GUEST BLOGGER: Why I Will Never Think Pink

This post is by a suspiciously similarly-named author, Samantha Lockhart, 2010 graduate of the College of William and Mary, environmental activist and organizer and former member of my household.  Following are her thoughts on a childhood favorite, the Fred Astaire - Audrey Hepburn musical  Funny Face (1957).

Contrasting career choices in Funny Face

FUNNY FACE

It is a special experience to rewatch a film that was a favorite as a child, but which you have rarely seen since.  It brings this feeling of comfortable familiarity – like you both know and don’t know what’s about to happen next.  Like having a recurring dream or watching a new M. Night Shyamalan movie.

Often, it means noticing things that you did not see as a child either because your innocence shielded you from it, or simply because you could not have gotten the reference without the social vocabulary that only a liberal arts education can provide.  But for me, and others like me, who grew up watching movies all the time; for those that were raised in part by film and whose life was chronicled in large part by the movies that populated each phase – rewatching these formative movies means so much more.  It’s like finding the pieces of the puzzle that make you who you are today.  Suddenly, you make sense to yourself in some small but important manner.  Like tracing your heritage and discovering your ancestral routes, it is an exercise which can help to show a clearer roadmap that has somehow helped determine fundamental things about the course of your life, your ambitions and your dreams.

Some of this has always been obvious to me, because the watching coincided so closely with my own consciousness of growing-up and self-discovery.  I always knew that The West Wing was a huge part of why I was interested in politics.  That was never a mystery that needed solving, that puzzle piece always fit for me squarely on Wednesday evenings at 9pm on NBC from ages 11 to 17.  But the stuff I watched when I was far too young to notice its impact or to remember it – rewatching those films can be incredibly revealing.  Sometimes it’s in small ways, like realizing that the reason that every time I have only one high heel on, I have the urge to say “Look! I was born on the side of a hill” has something to do with Bringing Up Baby or that every time I wish I was invisible I still shimmy goofily with my arms up because of Time of Their Lives.  But sometimes, the marks that these films leave can reveal themselves to be oddly profound.

Funny Face was one of my favorite movies as a kid, before Fred Astaire’s complete lack of sex appeal bothered to detract from the romance of it.  I remembered most vividly how stunningly beautiful the film is, filled with soft lighting contrasted with sharp, vivid colors that frame Audrey’s stunning face – the true star of the film, but somehow I had forgotten almost everything else. Yet as I watched it, somehow I found myself knowing every word.  One of the tests out there of whether a film has a feminist edge is whether two women ever have a conversation about something other than a man.  Well, Funny Face opens with a scene from a powerful, smart, sophisticated female editor of a major magazine talking to her staff of smart women. True, they’re talking about the color pink, but somehow it doesn’t matter.

Pink=ORDINARY

And the opening number "Think Pink" ends with an hilarious and somewhat empowering moment in which someone asks the fashion editor, Maggie, why she is the only one not in pink, to which she replies “I wouldn’t be caught dead” and walks away in a chic gray suit.  What I love about this is that Maggie is admitting that she is a marketing genius who has manipulated women across the country to like whatever she tells them to like. Right off the bat, this character means more to me than I ever recognized at the time.  Her success is not tied to a man, she is decisive, smart, elegant, sophisticated, wise – and she refuses to wear pink.  I have obstinately refused to wear pink since the age of 4.  I have always associated it with profound mediocrity.  I am obsessed with black and grey. Maggie is extraordinary, and she would not be caught dead.

Modeling=DUMB.

Jo – a boy’s shortening of what is assumed to be a longer girl’s name (Joanne? Josephine?), much like mine – Sam - is smart and never thinks of herself as being beautiful.  She finds fashion and modeling trivial and stupid.  I was a very cute kid.  I was more than cute – I was a stunning little girl.  I’m not saying that to be obnoxious, it’s just true.  I don’t think I measure up now nearly as well.  At the age of four of five, however, I could barely go anywhere without someone asking my parents if I was interested in modeling to which I replied a vehement “NO.”  My mother was confused.  She had been a dancer and actress and occasional model, had no moral objection to the venture that she could have passed onto her young daughter.  My parents were in financial straits and a little modeling money probably would not have hurt, but no one was going to make me do anything I didn’t’ want to do and I did NOT want to model. I perceived modeling as being trivial and stupid.  Of course, I believe that I was too young to appreciate the emotional transformation that Jo undergoes, feeling by the end of the film that modeling could be art, could be glamorous, could help her find the man she loves and could get her a ticket to fulfill her philosophic dreams.  HOWEVER, I do think that I picked up on some other things about Jo.

Sticking to your guns

For one thing – Jo has very strong principles that center around this concept of empathy.  She works in a bookstore in Greenwich Village and worships a philosopher in France.  Though she finds herself falling in love with drama and glamour of the fashion world through Dick, she does not lose herself to it.  Dick believes that once she has fallen in love with him, it means he “has” her.  She has entered his world and left her own.  She does not see it this way and gets angry with him, essentially ending the relationship by saying that they are “too fundamentally different” to be together.  She talks a lot about the importance of her principles which Dick seems to make fun of.  She is willing to give up on her budding relationship before she would give up on what she believes in.  I think this lesson hit home with me and has given me solid footing on the otherwise rocky terrain of love. 

Don’t Rescue Me

Dick’s condescending insistence that he knows better serves only to anger Jo.  Rather than let him fight her battles, she fights her own.  From getting the last word (or dance) in the café following Dick’s attempts to embarrass her to hitting Professor Flostre over the head with a statue – she can take care of herself. I’ve always been a fan of fighting my own battles, paying my own way, and living my own life and was known to yell at Gaston during Beauty and the Beast “When a lady says NO, she meeeaaans NO!”  And while studying abroad in India during college, threatened and shouted obscenities at the Indian men who made lude assumptions about Western Women.

Ya gotta be happy.

But the final and perhaps most important lesson from Funny Face  is “On how to be lovely, you gotta be happy.”  This marks the second time in the film in which women interact together in a burst of YaYa level female empowerment!  Maggie, the magazine editor, teaches Jo how to talk to the press about herself and provides a significant lesson.  In order to be beautiful, like Audrey Hepburn, you have to be joyful.  I have finally learned that my overwhelmingly positive and unflinchingly optimistic disposition can all be traced back to a profound and fundamental vanity. 

But…really?

Of course – I see in this film what I believe I saw then at age four or five.  I am following the interpretation that seems most familiar to me, like finding your way home when lost based on sheer instinct.  Were I to watch this film with completely fresh eyes, I may also point out that Dick is incredibly condescending about Jo’s philosophy and even says of Flostre “he has as much interest in your intelligence as I have” indicating, of course, very little.  Yet Jo, this incredibly beautiful, young, brilliant, principled, woman still ends up with Dick – the condescending photographer with no interest in her intelligence.  I could note that while Maggie is a successful female figure, she also appears to be unmarried and after all, is successful in the field of “fashion” – one typically assigned to women anyway.  I could choose to highlight that Professor Flostre does turn out to be a fraud and only after Jo for romantic reasons, as if to indicate that Dick was right all along and all Jo needed was a good man to show her the way. 

So perhaps it is a chicken and egg situation – maybe I was always a strong and principled girl and the parts of this film that spoke to that in me were the ones that I chose to listen to. But whether it was me looking for a story and  female figures to help more sharply define characteristics I already had or it was me building myself from scratch from the lessons taught by these films, it hardly seems to matter.  Either way, I hate pink.

Who is this movie for?

Like it or be indifferent to it (it's hard to hate something so deliberately dopey), the stage musical Rock of Ages knew exactly what it intended and who it was intended for.  It was Mamma Mia for the hair rock crowd, with a borrowed and indifferent plot linking a bunch of familiar hits perfectly suited for singing along, awash in middle-aged nostalgia.  The young people in the story served as surrogates for the audience, who was young 25 and 30 years ago, and the older characters were figures of fun.

The film of Rock of Ages (2012) does not seem to have such certainty.  Whereas people could attach themselves to the abstract surrogates of the young lovers in the stage version, film is always more specific, and the young people are no longer substitutes for the audience, but other, recognizable actors.  (Julianne Hough, specifically is now a veteran of Burlesque and Footloose and better get a job in a non-musical before she becomes unemployable).  We see, in full-color close-up, how young and fresh-faced these kids and they are no longer us.  Now we are the oldsters -- we are burnout Alec Baldwin or trying-to-reclaim-lost-glory Tom Cruise.  Both give superb performances, and both remind us, through their own appearances and our shared history with them, that we are old.  And nobody pays $12 to be reminded that they are older than they ever meant to be.

The other interesting question about the film (and there aren't many) is its narrative conventions.  Traditionally, music in musicals, as derived from the stage took part in the theatrical convention that snogs were heightened speech and that they were experienced by both the singer and the hearer as a heightened experience, but not necessarily as a song.  Song was a conventionalized special type of speech, akin to a character in verse drama launching into a long poetic flight.  The other characters may have felt the thoughts and emotions of the person speaking or singing, but they did not think "Hey- that was a good song" or "Hey - that was a purty poem."  Musicals took place in a parallel universe, or more accurately through a special musical prism which refracted high emotion in the form of music.

One day that convention started to make people uncomfortable.  Who is to say why conventions go in and out of style.  Film is riddled with them, but only some of them are apparent to most viewers.  They are acutely aware of, for instance, narrative cliche, but they refuse to notice that film is made out of bits and pieces of moving images which could not have been captured sequentially in continuous time and do not resemble the way we experience the real world in any way.  (This is excluding long boring art films shot with stationary cameras.)  One set of conventions infuriates people, and others are completely invisible to them.

A-ny-way, people started to think it was funny when film characters began to break into song, presumably because the space they occupy, both in the actual world and in the apparent film world, seemed more "real" to them than the more explicitly symbolic theater.  "People don't really do that."  (Presumably they do engage in high-volume gun battles in the street which have no casualties except for the Bad Guys -- I mean, nobody complains that action films are unrealistic, whereas they are just as stylized as any musical.)  So, since 1972 when Bob Fosse adapted the Broadway show Cabaret in such a way that all the music was what film professors call "diagetic", meaning that the songs are taking place in the world which the characters occupy in the rest of the film, musicals have adopted one of two pretexts for a musical number: (a) that people are performing right here and now in a conventional performance context and that the people present can hear them and are enjoying ; and (b) that the musical number is a sort of fantasy which is only being experienced by the person imagining this musical number.

Some films and shows have it both ways.  Chicago had them both ways at once, in which the events of the character's "real" life were re-imagined by her as performance numbers.  Thus, the songs could be strikingly specific to the story situation, more so than a real performance number would be, and their unreality could be shrugged off as being part of the performance context.

The television show Glee apparently alternates among the conventions.  Mostly, we see the eager children bursting to perform their heartfelt songs which are so coincidentally related to the story situation.   Often the realistic performance context (kids in school clothes in a schoolroom) gives way to an elaborately costumed and staged performance (not to mention processed, compressed and AutoTuned to a fare-the-well).  Since it would be ridiculous to imagine such complex performances being prepared on a weekly basis by high school kids in suburban Ohio, one must presume that the schmancy versions of these songs constitute the children's fantasy of what their number feels like, just the way Snoopy imagines that he really is a World War I flying ace or the way I imagine it's important to maintain this blog.

The other principal use of song in Glee is as inner monologue, as a reflection of a character's inner state.  Traditional theater musicals do this as well, in songs "in one", meaning all the way downstage, with the performer relating directly to the audience.  Dramatically speaking, a play need never define or decide whether this singing is "really" happening.  When Billy Bigelow imagines life with his son -- or his daughter -- in the Soliloquy from Carousel (Hammerstein borrowed the term straight from classical theater), it all takes place in a half-world in which a character sings out loud and strangers seated in front of him hear him and respond and react.  And he is allowed to acknowledge their presence.

Film has no such luxury.  When it does attempt to acknowledge the audience it comes over "theater-y" and stiff.  Buster Keaton was right to rap his knuckles on the glass of the camera lens.  There is a permanent barrier between actor and audience in film, and not just of the lens, but of place and time.  We live in two different "now"s and never the twain shall meet.  So film usually emulates Olivier's Hamlet, beginning the sung monologue with a close-up on the face which is thinking these thoughts.  From time to time the lips may move in synchronization with the music, but they may stop doing so.  Performance energy, which is central to the stage musical, is unnecessary and irrelevant on film.  That energy is provided by camera movement, dynamic staging and editing, rather than the performer's sweat and tears.

Rock of Ages plays it both ways, and the audience's easy acceptance of these two different and perhaps even contradictory conventions of song in narrative may mean that we are finally relaxed about musicals and can accept their artificial interludes in the same way as a kung fu fight, a car chase and other such entertainment elements in the types of films which are put together like fruitcakes; an often undigestible cake which can be tolerated for the periodic bits of candied fruit which are the cake's "raisin d'etre." (Pun intended, so don't e-mail me about misspelling.)

On the other hand, given Rock of Ages's difficulty in finding its audience, perhaps its reception in the theater, positive though it was, is not a significant indicator of anything.

You're going to thank me.

I am herewith posting for your benefit, the only 19 or 20 minutes of Skidoo (1968) that are worth seeing.  That said, they are extremely worth seeing.  They are simply buried inside a cinematic tomb that rivals anything old Cheops cranked out.

The backstory. Old-fashioned but still-skillful producer-director Otto Preminger decides to make a film about the scourge of the nation, LSD.  But, being an honest man, he tries it.  And he decides it is NOT the scourge of the nation.  But he's committed to make this movie with a large bunch of mismatched middle-aged and even elderly movie stars which is both for and against LSD.

I have to back-pedal even farther.  When I was growing up, Preminger was a star-director name nearly on a par with Alfred Hitchcock.  He made big pictures about big issues and he plastered his name and face all over them.  And he was not unjustified.  His films got big audiences and made big money.  And his technique, which he had been developing since the mid-1940s was extremely well-suited to the wide-screen epics of the 1960s.  Specifically, he preferred long, complex master shots, sometimes reframing the action with camera movement rather than recutting.  Paradoxically for such a control freak, this procedure gives power to the actors, who control the tempo and feel of the scene.  He counteracted that tendency by calling for extensively repeated takes, wearing the actors down.  (Also paradoxically, Preminger was an actor, and in films such as Wilder's Stalag 17, a good actor.)

His career breaks into distinct phases, beginning with the romantic noirs of the 40s, most famously Laura, and my personal favorite, Where The Sidewalk Ends.  The next phase began with The Moon Is Blue a standard-issue sexless sex comedy from a Broadway boulevard play.  But the heroine referred to herself as a "virgin" and the words "pregnant" and "mistress" were bandied about, causing pearls to be clutched across the country.  The film went out without an MPAA seal, made a pot of money from disappointed filmgoers who expected something sexy and turned Otto onto the controversy racket.

The last phase begins roughly around the time of Exodus in 1960, when controversy transmogrifies into international all-star epic.  Thus follows Advice and Consent, Hurry Sundown and The Cardinal.

Back to LSD.  Otto changes his mind and decides to make a pro-hippie movie.  Or at least a movie that suggests that these crazy kids might be worth listening to.  The first clue is in this unconventional opening in which husband Jackie Gleason and wife Carol Channing (bizarre couple, yes, I know) fight over the remote control, a fight seen from the TV viewer's POV.  (Note the inclusion of Preminger's own In Harm's Way in the onscreen melange.)  [Apologies in advance for any ads inserted by Daily Motion.]



Fairly early on, for reasons not worth delving into, Jackie gets his consciousness raised via an acid trip.  So far, so good, except that the sequence bears no resemblance to any acid trip taken by any known person.  It is fun, but fun like those goofy early 1930s movies packed with random non-sequiturs in the place of actual jokes.




Far better than seeing Groucho's head in place of a lightbulb is the acid trip experienced by veteran character actor Fred Clark, which is not only accompanied by a charming Harry Nillson song, but features some of the wackiest dancing and carrying-on by Clark as a prison guard who has unknowingly dropped LSD.   Clark was usually seen as grouchy bank officials turning down nice people for loans or mean neighbors who won't give the kids their football back and rarely had the opportunity to clown this way. The song in question begins at the 3:00 minute mark in this clip.



Finally, we have the last nine minutes or so of the film.  This includes the rather catchy title song, accompanying an incomprehensible sequence in which Carol Channing and her daughter's hippy friends occupy gangster Groucho Marx's yacht, while Groucho turns on and becomes a Buddhist.  I include this clip principally for the final few minutes in which Harry Nillson sings the credits.  All of them.  Right down to the wardrobe mistress and the production accountant.  That's freakier than Gleason's acid trip.




Make no mistake.  By no means is Skidoo a good film.  But it is an instructive bad film, and one with some moments of inspiration of enchantment.  Personally, I would never have thought Otto had it in him.

Under my head

A passel of young'uns snapping their whippers

As far as I can tell, the 2011 remake of Footloose is a pretty good for what it's meant to be, an excuse for tweeners to get out of the house and dream about how exciting it will be to be in high school.  (This sort of fantasy is always accomplished with the help of 27-year-old actors pretending to be 17.)  It is competently put together, with some moments of visual excitement which may be attributable to the skills of director Craig Brewer, who has made much more challenging films prior hereto (Hustle and Flowand Balck Snake Moan).  I am sure this was driven both by the paycheck and genuine affection for the original 1984 film, an affection I cannot feel, as I was already too old for the first film when that one came out.

Yet I see many films for which I am not the target demo, yet they reach me in some way.  I didn't mind Footloose, I didn't dislike it, yet I find it difficult to write anything about it because it felt like just a bunch of bits of film edited together so they would last an hour-and-three-quarters.  Nothing specific was communicated to me.  I know that was just me-- the film inspired both pleasure and displeasure from many, but I just felt a pleasant numbness.

What makes a film land or not land for any individual viewer?  I could say that I think the whole premise is phony and artificial -- that towns don't outlaw dancing, although specific religious sects do.  Director-co-writer Brewer tried to increase the plausibility factor by putting the fatal accident that triggers the repression at the front of the film (after a quite energetic title sequence), but a film like this is not meant to be believability, and such things almost damage the film.  I'm reminded of films that Laurel and Hardy made in the 1940s at the major studios, rather than the independent Hal Roach studio where they had done their best work.  The studios changed their make-up and lighting to be more natural and beelievable, and in the process destroyed much of what was charming about Laurel and Hardy.  They were always strange and fantastical characters, and to put them in the real world revealed them as aging, overweight men who seemed to be so simple that they should have been under medical supervision.  No longer golden fools dancing in the moonlight, they were old and pathetic.

Moreover, the film is not a musical.  Musicals I like.  Musicals I understand.  They have a special grammar and logic that appeals to me and bypasses the rational mind.  But Footloose wants to be rational.  The key, turning point scene consists of the villain and the hero making speeches.  Not singing, not dancing, but talking.  Talking about dancing.  But talking about dancing is not dancing.  This is an out-and-out confession that the filmmakers do not know how to make dance dramatic, or indeed even narrative.  Instead, dancing is appliqued onto a story of generation clash, and the same script could be used (and doubtless will be) for tagging, skateboarding or hang-gliding or whatever those wild kids want to get up to.  It would be unsurprising to see Tuesday Weld show up as a troubled teen.  In any event, the film is a romantic melodrama with comedy overtones and a lot of footage of young people dancing.  But not a musical.

The dancing, need I point out with overmuch emphasis (as Peter Cook said), is devoid of narrative content.  The boys and girls dance because they want to dance, because they are young, and because both in movies and the real world, dancing is a socially acceptable form of public foreplay -- almost communal foreplay.  Consequently, the single best sequence in the film is the "Let's Hear It For The Boy" montage in which the non-dancing comical sidekick gradually learns to dance, and with attitude and style.  That sequence alone gives me hope that Mr. Brewer will stop his flirtation with music and make a real full-out musical someday. 

Thus I think the best audience for this film are groups of happy 8 and 9 year olds watching the movie in large basement rec rooms watching the screen and aping the dance steps as they go along, although I shudder to think of the kiddie hip grinding that is likely to ensue.  Maybe the film should be issued in a karaoke dancealong version.

Ultimately the point is that there is no point in reading anything anyone writes about Footloose.  Because it is called Footloose, the name of a 1984 film, you know almost exactly what this is and you are capable of deciding whether you will like it or not, based on that fact.  That it is decent and professional is gratifying, but irrelevant, and people like me are irrelevant as spectators.

I hope it earns Mr. Brewer the privilege of making something closer to the heart -- his and mine.

High kickin' it Old School

I'm not sure how I missed At Long Last Love (1975) when it first came out -- I was in college, I was a big fan of its director Peter Bogdanovich, who had pulled a hat trick with The Last Picture Show (1971), What's Up Doc (1972) and Paper Moon (1974), and had the time and inclination to see almost everything that came out, or at least that was showing in nearby South Hadley, Mass.  For all I know, it never arrived in Western Massachusetts, as it was savaged by the critics, (who it would have needed in order to succeed) got a reputation as a mega-flop (although it wasn't that expensive), was slightly recut, quickly played off and disappeared.  The devastation was so complete, that the film still has never received a homevideo release.  The clips floating around are evidently homevideo air checks, like the rather fuzzy potpourri I've embedded above.

I just caught up with it on Netflix, although it will be expiring soon from that site.  The good news for buffs is that it will finally get a legitimate home release and we can have a debate about its merits or lack thereof on an equal footing.  The rather interesting story of how the film was rediscovered and partially restored is told here, but in short, an employee of the Fox Archives who liked the movie, restored some cut material and circulated that version as the standard television cut.  No one, not even the director, is calling it a lost masterpiece, but it is not at all as bad as its reputation.

The bad: 

-  There is no story.  Really.  Two couples, switch partners Shakespeare-style, and the servants chase each other in the pantry.  End of synopsis.  Evidently screenwriter Bogdanovich is one of those people who became so enamored with the sheer spectacle of people singing and dancing on film, they failed to observe that is only interesting over the length of a feature if one is engaged in their characters, and if the songs reflect the inner narrative.  This is even true of the Fred-and-Ginger whose stories are often dismissed as piffle.  Piffle they may be, but a great deal of energy was put into keeping the lovers apart, so that when they could be together and especially dance together, the relief of tension was palpable.  The conventions of romantic comedy and/or farce may not be dramatically intense, but they will suffice to support the tension-and-release contours that drive the musical.  Just as 1 is infinitely greater than 0, so a "light story" is infinitely more substantial than no story at all.

-  Diulio DelPrete has no business in this movie.  He's not terrible, but he doesn't sing, dance, perform comedy or possess either sex appeal or charisma sufficient for him to belong in a quartet with Cybill Shepherd, Burt Reynolds and Madeline Kahn.  It's no disgrace to him.  I don't belong in that company, either, but so far, Hollywood has shown immensely good sense by not co-starring me in major films.

-  Madeline Kahn is permitted to sing under pitch, which she had a tendency to do if not curbed.  Burt Reynolds frequently tries to mask his lack of ability by slurring and sliding around, but he's not as bad as he thought, and should have been encouraged to sing his songs straight.

- The choreography is uninspiring and ill-considered, a problem compounded by the lack of dancers.  Stage veteran Eileen Brennan is at least relaxed in comparison to the rest of the cast, but Bogdanovich's model, Lubitsch (more about that later) dispensed with choreography, and Mr. B should have considered it.

- The first scene and song of the movie are terrible, Kahn sings it "drunk" and it takes quite a while for the film to recover.  I am sure this really hurt during its initial theatrical release.  Everyone experienced knows how critical it is for the first number to not only land just right, but to define the show.  Think of "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof, "Rock Island" from The Music Man, "Racing With The Clock" from Pajama Game.  A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum almost closed in infamy until it changed its opening number.

The good:

-  Cybill Shepherd sings very well, on key and with a well-controlled vibrato to give her notes a good finish.  Often the only way she can sing high notes is loudly, but that doesn't mean they are piercing or off-key, they're just not subtle.  Her dancing is a little studied, it's true, but,as discussed above, no one in this film is dancing with carefree abandon.

- Bogdanovich's controversial decision to do live recording on the set gives the musical performances an authenticy and a sense of reality that breathes a great deal of energy into the film.  Instead of the overly-processed sound of a voice pressed up against a microphone, we feel the entire space that the performer is in, and (unlike present theater, where everything is now miked) it makes a difference which way a performer is facing, or if they leave or enter a room.  Some of the traveling shots with music are applause-worthy.

-  Similarly, the long uninterrupted takes hand control of the musical performance back to the performer.  Yes, this would be a better idea if the two romantic leads had had more experience at these things, but it doesn't negate the principal that this is the right way to stage and shoot musical numbers.

-  The Porter numbers are great, there's a number of little-known, but top-drawer songs and the music direction overall is just fine.  Not infrequently, a song ends, then resumes a few minutes later reaching into that enormous lower drawer full of extra verses that Porter always seemed to write.  This is a film for fans of song lyrics, even when the lyrics don't suit the characters or the situation all that well.

-  The production design is clean, satirical (clearly it is poking fun at the "Big White Set" seen in later musicals of the 1930's), lavish without being overpowering in that "70s period movie" way.

Why did it take such a beating?

-  It's not perfect, and parts of it are not good at all.  (Although most of it is entertaining.)

-  Many critics seem to feel Bogdanovich had been overpraised (often by those very critics) and it was time to lower the boom.  Musicals are always a sitting duck for these things. (e.g. New York, New York).

-  The low standards of film history in 1975.  Most critics thought  At Long Last Love was meant to be a gloss on or an homage to the Astaire-Rogers series.  After all, those were musicals made in the 30s, right?  Few of them had the knowledge or the thought to realize that Bogdanovich's models were the MacDonald - Chevalier or even MacDonald - Buchanan musicals of the very early sound period.  First of all, that should have been obvious because by the time Astaire entered the movies, musicals were shot to playback, not with live recording on the set.  That idea by itself sets the model back to the 1929-1931 period, when musicals were either the godawful 100% talking 100% singing 100% dancing "let's-get-everybody-in-the-studio-in-this-thing" revues, a sprinkling of transcriptions of Broadway shows like Rio Rita and The Cocoanuts, or the witty Lubitsch musicals.  Again, Reynolds and Shepherd confuse the issue, as they resemble none of the actors in Bogdanovich's models, although butler John Hillerman and personal maid Eileen Brennan do.

The point is, ALLL got panned for not being a Fred & Ginger movie, when it had no intention of being one.  It's like criticizing me for my embroidery work.  (Which I would call pointless if I was inclined toward puns.)

Neither a mass market pleaser nor caviare to the general, At Long Last Love rewards the curiosity of anyone with interest in and knowledge of movie and stage musicals.  And, really, it its present age of 37 years, it really can't hurt anyone.

What's the deal with 80s cult films?

I lived through the 1980s. I was trying to start a career and successfully starting a family. I should remember the era as a golden time. It sucked. Disco refused to die, although people with their hearts in the right places tried to stomp it with hobnail boots. Movies for grownups disappeared. The clothes were mostly hideous. The government under Ronnie Ray-Gun found it could act like a bad boyfriend, taking our money and giving us nothing for it, letting us lose our jobs and refusing to help or support us and making up stories so we'd feel better, and co-dependent America ate it up.

It was an era of "bad is good", "tacky is stylish", "lame is cool" and, of course, the era of Gordon Gekko telling us "greed is good." (Any biologist will tell you that self-preservation and self-interest is good. Organisms that take more than they need will die from it.) And if anything demonstrates that "bad is good," it's 80's cult movies.

Maybe I was just too old. But if Point Blank is a cult film representing the 60s, and Red Dawn is a cult film representing the 80s, one must acknowledge a overall degeneration in the amount and quality of gray matter among the populace.

The cult film thing got so big after the success of midnight audience participation showings of Rocky Horror, that film executives apparently began making films in order to become objects of cult, rather than appealing to the general movie-going public. Thus, we have The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension (1984). Incidentally, the filmmakers objected to the distributor adding the last half of that title. Why? Because it destroyed the dignity of their fine work?????

According to John Lithgow's comments made at the L.A. Film Festival in May, the character and mythology of Buckaroo Banzai began as a sort-of running joke between college classmates writer Earl MacRauch and director W.D. Richter. Once Richter had gained a foothold in the business, they decided to unleash their joke adventure into a world primed by Star Wars and Indiana Jones to accept riffs on 30s serial adventures as a respectable film genre. They had worked out a back story and a milieu for Banzai and his Hong Kong Cavaliers, which actually sounds as if it would have been fun if they series of films they planned had actually been made. But the first film crashed in general release (as it deserved to), and this one film represents the entire saga.

The problem is a textbook example of the Springtime for Hitler syndrome. When you're making a silly piece of work, you can't make everything silly or it becomes tedious; most of all, you cannot have ALL your characters be silly, especially the ones who are supposed to be scary, like Hitler. And Buckaroo Banzai, supposed to be a light romp of an adventure turned into a grand Olympian conclave of overactors, led by the Grand Pooh-Bah of OTP, John Lithgow.



Also seen is this clip, is Lithgow's greatest living rival for the title of King of OTP, Christopher Lloyd. Lloyd is under a severe handicap in this film, having his head encased in a lizard thing, but he does what he can (and more than makes up for it in the Back To The Future trilogy and Star Trek III). But I would maintain that Lithgow still deserves the top spot. Whereas Lloyd's characters are loud and overstated because that's what the voices inside their heads tell them to do, Lithgow seems always to be playing for the least affluent theatergoers in the 3rd balcony who seem to live in Lithgow's head. He is, by his own admission, most comfortable in theater and in television with a studio audience, and always looks disappointed in films that his unhinged antics are not met with wild applause and cheering.

Completing this particular Pantheon is Jeff Goldsmith, who is so consummate an overactor, that he can overact while appearing to underact. His character are is quiet almost to the point of appearing sleepy, but prone to reel off a long run of supergeek gobbledegook so potent as to suck the air out of any scene he appears in. (I just regret that nobody thought to bring Christopher Walken into the cast - or that he was perhaps unavailable.) Is it a wonder that nobody can take this film seriously, or even figure out how it wants to be taken? The cardboard cut-out production design, bombastic music and cheesy photography don't help. (The photography isn't the director's fault - the studio fired his choice and hired the guy who shot The Man From Uncle, a cheese-fest if there ever was one.) Worst of all, the film lacks the sincerity and authenticity of, say, a movie like Evil Dead. Even if it's not good, you know that Sam Raimi BELIEVES in it.

Nobody could like this film and nobody did. There were a few people who LOVE it, and they still do, and it is entirely possible you are or may be one of them. If so, I pray to heaven you do not have a job that involves dangerous equipment or small children, lest you cause serious damage.

Pink Floyd The Wall (1982), on the other hand, bears all the marks of a sincerely-intended piece of work, but fated for cult status nonetheless.

First of all, the producers were banking on the popularity of a rock group as the basis of their audience, heedless of the fact that the fan base of the most popular rock or pop stars at any time; let's say, for example Lady Gaga as I write this, constitute less than 5% of the number of people you need to see a moderately-budgeted motion picture just to get your money back, let alone make a profit. Music - even pop - is a poor basis for commercial success. Add to this that the story is not the usual trope of teenage rebellion against stifling adult society that fuels such works as Tommy, Footloose and Rock, Rock, Rock. (The latter is the one about Tuesday Weld raising enough money to buy a prom dress.) Instead, Our Hero in The Wall has ALREADY achieved Rock God status and finds that it Means Nothing. We can all identify with that, can't we, especially when we're 15 years old? Oh dear, I have fame and wealth and power over people and I can have anything and anything I want, but I am numb inside because I don't know who I am or what my life is for. That's a pretty common problem, don't you think?

Add to that, the film's narrative is not only broken up into barely-related fragments without dialogue rather than a linear story with plots, subplots and characters. The style is more like the cinema equivalent of tableaux vivants, as in this perhaps most famous example attacking the ineffectual and sterile nature of education as we know it.



On top of this, the narrative is frequently interrupted by nightmare animation sequences by Gerald Scarfe, which at least has the possible advantage from a parent's point of view of convincing teens to delay sex for years, perhaps even decades:



All snark aside, this is serious work seriously intended and a signal achievement in the relationship of music to imagery. But I sure hope the people who permitted this film to be made were under no illusion that this would be a blockbuster.

The authors of the meta-musical [title of show] write, "I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing/Than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing." That's the definition of cult, a type of product that thrived in a peculiar way 25 years, before the Coming of the Conglomerates.

If I've piqued your interest in The Wall (and it is worth seeing if you're not easily disturbed by movies or music), here's the whole darn thing for you to watch, provided you have a spare 95 minutes:

Soul sold

Though I've seen it many times, I just re-watched the 1958 film version of the Broadway musical Damn Yankees (I got a very good price on a DVD). The film settles a long-standing argument between Broadway and film aficionados, specifically the claim that the movies change Broadway shows too much and all that is needed is to take the Broadway script and cast and "open it up" a little and you have a good movie. Damn Yankees is proof positive that it ain't so. The film uses the entire original cast, save the exchange of one insignificant juvenile lead for another, one substituted number, another cut and some slight shuffling of the running order.

Yet despite the fidelity to a 1,000-performance Broadway show, the film feels flat. A little film history suggests exactly what went wrong. Production was rushing to beat the deadline of a threatened musicians' strike. The deadline was missed, so the actors lip-synched to the Broadway cast album. Later the film music was recorded in Rome (with the orchestrations almost identical to the originals--an unusual situation for music supervisor Ray Heindorf, who usually put his stamp on the scores he worked for), and the voice tracks recorded to fit (often badly) the lip movements already filmed. The result is that when the singers are performing, they cannot fully concentrate on the performance, but in both the filming and the recording process had technical procedures foremost in mind.

That rush to finish the film may explain why the scenes are often played in long takes and long shots with occasionally badly cut inserts. And of course, the actors are stuck with Abbott's strange text with the inept attempt at aping natural speech and all sorts of non-sequiturs that are meant to sound like breezy chatter. None of this explains why the dialogue scenes proceed at such a leisurely tempo. I suspect the actors were just reading the lines the way they had been for two-and-a-half years, but why couldn't Stanley Donen (who despite the co-directing credit, was the only person on the stage actually directing the film) have gotten the actors to pick up their cues, and even perhaps interrupt or overlap? The word "stilted" doesn't begin to describe the effect. (Walston, who later became a good movie and television actor is the worst offender here. You can almost see his eyes scanning the seats in the back of the orchestra.)

Nonetheless, no one is going to burn the negative, because the film is the best record we have of the great Gwen Verdon at her height. A lot of people feel that she didn't become a star because her performance was stagy. That's nonsense. First of all, as the clip below shows, Gwen is quite subtle and knowing in "A Little Brains, A Little Talent." Some people are upset that the movie powers insisted she omit her hip bumps, but I don't miss them -- they help to bring the tone of the number down to an appropriate level for the movies. "Whatever Lola Wants" is, of course, deliberately stagy, not only because the intent was to record Bob Fosse's original staging and Verdon's performance, but because the song is not meant to be actually arousing and sexy. It is a satire of sex appeal and the sirens who are supposed to have it. The whole sequence is deliberately ridiculous. To have Lola be actually sexy and desirable to Joe would complicate the entire story.

This viewing I really sat up for a number that I barely remembered from previous viewings. Here in, "Two Lost Souls" Fosse seems to be on his way to film directing in a way he hadn't before. Sure, the lighting and camera staging probably had contributions from Stanley Donen and cinematographer Harold Lipstein, but like no Fosse number before, this seems to have been designed for the camera. Not that it's all cuts and close-ups, but it has a fluidity of movement and of changes in scale and focus that recall the best work of Vincent Minelli, Chuck Walters and Donen and Kelly at MGM in the glory days.

But finally the film will be remembered and copies treasured by every dance fan and aspiring dancer for this next clip, which is the only color footage of Verdon and Fosse together in a typically irrelevant Adler & Ross specialty called "Who's Got The Pain?" (The joke, lost to pop culture history, is that the mambo seems to always incorporate strange vocalizations that sound like bird squawks or cries of gastic distress. Get an old Xavier Cugat or Perez Prado mambo record from the mid- to late-50s and you'll see what they mean.) On stage, Verdon had done the number with a company dancer named Eddie Phillips. But this was film and film lasts, so Bob Fosse (who had already appeared on film in Kiss Me Kate and Give A Girl A Break alongside later choreography-director rival Gower Champion) took the stage shoulder to shoulder in one of the most raucous love duets you'll ever see. Because that's what this is -- the love of two performers and artists for each other and their work. They married shortly after this was filmed, and although they didn't live together for the rest of their lives, they never really fell out of love. How could they have?

Why a remake?

For most of the history of dramatic storytelling, originality of the plot was not considered a primary virtue. The ancient Athenians expected to know the story of the play they were going to see in advance--in fact, most of them were traditional stories they had known from childhood, or perhaps soon after. The playwright's art was the expression of that story and the character's reaction the events through verse and dance. Making up a new story would have completely confused your average Athenian, sort of like those two old ladies who always sit behind you at the movies and try to figure out the story out loud while you're trying to hear the dialogue.

Shakespeare, as we all know, swiped his stories from legends, from from Hollinshed's Chronicles from Plutarch's Lives and Italian and other story collections. Nobody faulted him for that in his own era. It is only since short story writers such as O'Henry and Maugham popularized the twist ending that it became bad form to give away the story, culminating in the great story conspiracy of Hitchcock's Psycho.

So the idea of a remake is not inherently dishonorable, at least in historical perspective. So why retell an already told story?

1. We know everybody likes it. The trouble with this in the home video era, is that we can always go back to the source. Back in the day, when MGM remade Little Women in 1949, they knew that not many people would have a good memory of the 1933 RKO version, but just to make sure, they bought the earlier film and suppressed it. But nowadays, if we're jonesing to see Wuthering Heights, we have the choice of about eight different versions, including a number of television adaptations. But none of them have the heat of the Olivier-Oberon 1939 version, one of the sexiest movies ever made where people keep their clothes on. (Other contenders: Notorious and To Have and Have Not.)

Worst example of "we know everybody likes it:" Gus van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. Color film, lesser actors and nothing gained (and quite a bit lost).

2. Let's see how the story or the characters change when we bring them into a new era. So The Front Page, which has been filmed four times since 1929, was most recently set at a cable news network in 1988, to see how the story is different. Turns out, not much, but that was OK. In the case of The Women, the original 1940 characters lived in a world of severely limited possibilities for women, and competing for men was one of their few active options. Today's version makes those women seem even more petty and small, given all the other choices they could make with their lives. Body Heat is not a remake, but it frankly reworks themes and story tropes of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice with the sexual frankness of the 1980s, not available to filmmakers in the 1940s. This may sound like the basis of a Skinemax epic, but Kasdan uses the sexual heat to add a layer of tension and ambiguity to the already complex characterizations.

3. Let's see how the story or characters change with different actors. A hit-and-miss matter. For example, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr seem to click better in 1957's Affair to Remember than do Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in the 1939 original, Love Affair. On the other hand Audie Murphy in 1954's Destry can't hold a candle to Jimmy Stewart in 1939's Destry Rides Again. (Besides, we all know that 1939 was a phenomenal year in film.)

4. Let's take the story in a different direction. This is not attempted very often. For one thing, there is often common source material, such as a novel. (Sometimes a remake will be done in order to return to the original story, such as the various remakes of Wuthering Heights and Dracula which purport to return to the source works and discard the "improvements" of the original Hollywood films.) The dreadful remake of Sleuth and Planet of the Apes felt compelled to add a new twist, since the original twists were so well known--in neither case did that work out well.

This final tack is how the French sex melodrama Nathalie (2003) became the American stalker flick Chloe (2008). In both cases, a woman decides to test her husband's fidelity by hiring a woman to try and have an affair with him (when was this ever a good idea?) The first half-hour of each film is almost scene-for-scene identical. Then they begin to diverge, and the final half-hour of each is almost utterly and completely different. Interestingly, Anne Thompson, co-writer and director of Nathalie participated in the reworking and approved it, presumably because the result was a completely different (and inferior) movie.

The differences are also illustrative of the differences between American and French ideas about sex and adultery. In France, adultery seems to be an almost inevitable hazard of long-time marriage, something to be gotten through, but survived. In the States, when the adultery is long-standing and has an emotional content (not merely casual sex), most people believe the marriage is and should be over. (I have not desire to point out who is more correct--it is merely an observation about the two cultures.)

Thus, when Fanny Ardant hires Emmanuel Beart to have an affair with her husband (Gerard Depardieu--who else?) she did not expect them to consummate it at first, but when it happens, she is not repulsed but intrigued. She sees an opportunity to gain perspective on her husband in the bedroom through this other woman's eyes. Ardant demands that Beart describe their encounters in graphic detail, and apparently derives a sexual frisson from that language. Ardant and Beart have a more obvious chemistry between each other than either has with Depardieu, and their bond seems deeper. Consequently, when it is revealed that Beart has betrayed Ardant's trust for the sake of a few Euros, Ardant is hurt; nonetheless, she has learned and grown from the experience, and husband and wife return to each other with a renewed commitment. (SPOILER ALERT - It helps that the Beart-Depardieu affair never happened.)

Americans are not so natural about their sexuality, and so Julianne Moore in Chloe never really ceases to be uptight. It doesn't help that Amanda Seyfried still looks she just got her high school diploma, not at all the experienced sophisticated seductress of the French film. It looks as though Moore is inviting her husband to be a pederast, not a roue. Like the original, the hired girl has her own agenda, but in Chloe it's not money she's after, but love. SPOILER ALERT - In the remake, the hired girl is unhinged, and pursuing the wife, who succumbs. Then, given the American penchant for hyped melodrama and the legacy of Fatal Attraction, Chloe goes completely around the bend, violence ensues, and Chloe dies a violent death, ostensibly because she wanted to hurt Julianne Moore, but subliminally as a punishment for being bi-sexual. (That minx--she betrayed all her customers in the strip club by not desiring them!)

So points for not doing a cookie cutter remake, which never works anyway, because once you've changed the artists--the actors, designers, photographer, director--you have a different film; not to mention the different setting in time and place. But points off for taking the initial story premise and steering straight for the cheap, the obvious and the fake. There is nothing to take away from Chloe to reflect on--it says nothing about marriage, sex, love or life. The only takeaway is "watch out for crazy people," which is something that I personally figured out a while ago. (Although it's not always possible.) Still, there was some creativity involved, though the result be largely negative.

The 1945 musical State Fair was remade in 1962 for straight-up commercial reasons. Musicals were becoming popular again, the songwriters Rodger and Hammerstein were money in the bank, and had a relationship with 20th Century Fox, the studio that filmed all the adaptations of their plays except the somewhat neglected Flower Drum Song and Fox already owned the story and six songs from the earlier film.

There were some problems. The 1945 State Fair is short at 100 minutes and lacking lavish production values, given the standards of 1962. The cast, settings, score and length would all need to be inflated. Moreover, only one of the six songs, "It Might As Well Be Spring" is integrated into the action of the story in the manner developed and popularized by Rodgers and Hammerstein. 20th Century Fox studio chief Darryl Zanuck once sent out an edict that songs in a musical had to be justified. That makes sense--the song should fit the characters who sing it and the story situation they are in. But that's not what Zanuck meant. He meant that if there was instrumental accompaniment, you should at least show a guy with an accordion, or else the audience would wonder where the music was coming from. Which demonstrates that for all his story sense in other areas, in musicals Zanuck was an idiot. Yes, musicals use an artifice and convention that people sing to express their emotional states, and that to make it more pleasing we provide an accompaniment. But cowboy movies, monster pictures and war pictures have just as many artifices and conventions--don't get me started.

The next time somebody says, "Musicals are stupid because they start singing and you can't figure out where the music's coming from," tell them, "All movies are stupid because people do all kinds of stuff in front of a camera but they never notice there's a camera and a cameraman." So there. It's all artificial, so get over yourself.

Another problem with the 1945 State Fair is that there are not enough songs for the story and a lot of key character developments go by without being musicalized, especially in the second half of the film, which starts bursting with chatter and even sprouts a strange character, a song-plugger played by ever-reliable Frank McHugh who talks for pages and pages about the music business but is really just there to provide the information that the young hero's sweetheart is unhappily married. It's really very lumpily put together.

So in 1962, some things are smoother and more professional. Where "That's For Me" was sung by a chanteuse before she has even met her sweetheart, it becomes an explosion of emotion for Pat Boone's character just after he has met Ann-Margaret. (It's Ann-Margaret in 1962--you can forgive a guy for wanting to run around singing. Or doing something.)



(Sorry, the actual clip from the 1962 film is not available, so here is the soundtrack with a montage of photos of Ann-Margaret. You should get the idea that the second version was more explicitly passionate.



"Isn't It Kind of Fun" is a harmless ditty in 1945. In 1962, it's the ammunition for a sex bomb, that is Ann-Margret one year before she tormented American youth with "Bye Bye Birdie."

And I really wish I could show you Tom Ewell singing, "Sweet Hog of Mine" to an enormous boar he is showing at the fair. Or Alice Faye teaching her daughter to "Never Say No To A Man" (meaning you can tell them no without actually saying the word). Where Dana Andrews in 1945 plays a city guy enjoying the rural sights, Bobby Darin in 1962 looks like he's on his way to another, better movie and trying to get this part over quick.

Whereas the cast of 1945 is sincerely committed to this candy-coated view of American rural life (part of the American Way we were defending so hard in 1945, in 1962--except for Pat Boone and Pamela Tiffin who were trying to launch film careers--everyone else looks like they showed up to pick up a paycheck.

Oh, and the setting of the Fair changed from Iowa (losing a charming song) to Texas. Blee-a-a-ah. Let's face it, the only good movies about Texas are the ones that show what narrow-minded hell it can be, like Giant, Hud and The Last Picture Show. Trying to make Texas lovable would be like making Kevin Spacey cute.

True, the Hollywood production system demonstrated that it was not always necessary to have passion to make a great film. Casablanca was churned out by the great production machinery like any other sausage, and it came out really tasty. But still, it helps if you have some else on your mind besides a meal ticket. That goes for remakes as much as any other kind of film.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Great Depression

This clip from Torch Singer (1933) starring Claudette Colbert is a wonderful encapsulation of a certain level of Depression entertainment which affirms just how hard things are, and how you can change them if you just seize hold of your opportunities. This was the dominant economic mythology of the era, and it may have helped America survive it.

It also confirms that sometimes the only way to be a mother is to reject full-time motherhood. Poor Claudette is lumbered with a baby which she is pressured by the nuns to surrender, so she becomes hard-boiled Claudette--don't miss the last minute or so of this clip as you see her moving up the entertainment ladder from gin mill to swanky Broadway club. When she suddenly substitutes for a would-be children's radio entertainer, she re-connects with her inner Mommy, which takes her on the road to reclaiming her child.

Which introduces another theme of this movie--how radio permits the creation and adoption of a fabricated identity. And the anonymity works both ways. When Colbert tries to find her daughter by reaching out to all the girls with her name, her search takes her to a little black girl in a slum. But the film sidesteps both minstrel humor and condescension, and Colbert immediately masks her disappointment at not finding her girl and goes ahead and has a lovely visit with the girl.

As one might expect, the film provides a reunion for the parents, who now see that they could indeed make a life together and all is neatly resolved, but after all, stories do have to have ends. Most people wouldn't be satisified with same s***, different day as the ending of a movie. But I can't help suspecting that that is exactly how Depression filmmakers would have liked to end their films. (And how, in the case of I Am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Heroes for Sale, they did end the film.)

Just waiting for that kitchen sink to show up

Murder at the Vanities (1934) is the kind of film that only a producer could concoct. It's part whodunnit, part hokum comedy (with Jack Oakie and Victor MacLaglen competing to be Biggest Hambone of 1934), part musical (featuring Kitty Carlisle, just a year before climbing aboard with the Marx Brothers) and part skin show.

The picture takes its title, setting and aesthetic inspiration from one of the sleaziest showmen in theatrical history, Earl Carroll, creator of Earl Carroll's Vanities, a review like the Ziegfeld Follies or the Shubert Passing Show, which appeared in new editions on an annual or near-annual basis in the 1920s and 30s. Carroll was as close as one could get to smut peddler within mainstream entertainment of the early 20th century. His mob connections got him a jail term when he perjured himself to protect some bootlegger buddies, which added to his notoriety. He was also a well-known cheapskate.

Murder at the Vanities partakes of Carroll's spirit, tossing together a wild variety of entertainment, plenty of girls, not much money spent on either top-tier talent or underwear for the women. The film has become notorious on the YouTubes because of a song called "Sweet Marijuana;" there are also a couple of numbers from the Duke Ellington Orchestra, still in its first generation, and yet to experience the Swing Boom that Benny Goodman kicked off in 1935. Ellington still swings hard, especially in something called "The Rape of the Rhapsody," which would an example of surrealism in music, if such a thing existed.

Clearly, the producers didn't care much about the mystery. The police can't be bothered stopping the show, even with a murder backstage, and the investigation seems to be conducted by having the producer (Oakie) and the cop (McLaglen) alternately yell at each other and ogle girls. Meanwhile, characters run around on stage with both fake and real guns, without any intervention by the authorities. What could this show have looked like to its audience?

On top of all this, some German guy debuts the song "Cocktails for Two," soon to fall victim to Spike Jones, and Kitty Carlisle sings, referring to the Earl Carroll girls, "Where Do They Come From and Where Do They Go?"

Nobody has an answer for that one.

The limits of professionalism

The Helen Morgan Story (1957) demonstrates what happens when the machinery of the studio system is in place without the inspiration, artistry or audience that made the work of the Classical Era powerful. Directed by echt-studio-craftsman-director Michael Curtiz, photographed by Ted McCord (who began with cheap Westerns in the 20s, working himself up to Treasure of the Sierra Madre and East of Eden, and such other studio-era hands as Ray Heindorf for music and actors Richard Karlson, Walter Woolf King, Torben Meyer, Leonid Kinsky and Joe Besser, it moves with a brisk pace recalling early 30s gangster classics directed by people like William Wellman, Raoul Walsh, Lloyd Bacon and Mervyn Leroy.

But though the shell looks perfect, the spark has gone. Paul Newman as the bad-guy boyfriend does his best (remarkable in light of stories that he hated the script and the director), but he is too naturally believable and ambiguous to have the hard-edge snap of a Cagney or a Robinson. And Ann Blyth as Helen Morgan only really comes alive when she is lip-synching Gogi Grant's voice--a rich, stylish contralto in complete contrast to Morgan's wobbly mezzo-soprano. (Blyth was a good singer herself, but with an ingenue voice unsuitable to this story.) And without being able to depict the depth of Morgan's despair and degradation, there is no story. A confused girl has some success, is done in by men who want to exploit her, succumbs to alcoholism. A simple downward spiral, with no second texture or complexities.

One sign of the final gasp of studio filmmaking is the tacked-on happy ending. Morgan died of cirrhosis of the liver without a career revival or personal happiness. But it didn't matter. The audience for show-biz bios of characters of 25 years before had left, seeking historic epics, cheap monster pics, and teen-age hot rod and rock and roll flicks. The Helen Morgan Story tanked and took Ann Blyth's career with it. The craftsmanship meant nothing without artistry.

There's a lot of good tunes, though.

What to watch on the 4th of July?

America's Independence Day has a surprisingly prominent place among movie holidays. There's a sequence in Holiday Inn in which Fred Astaire plays with firecrackers. How about that black-and-white fireworks sequence that begins Manhattan? Born on the Fourth of July is a scathing critique of conventional American patriotism. Revolution was a hideous misfire, and The Patriot, despite good intentions, becomes a gorefest. Of course there is the kill-the-aliens epic Independence Day, but the most patriotic image in that film is the blowing up the White House. Best to stay with the more conventional choices:

1. 1776 - an unimaginatively literal transcription of a musical play (the failure to come up with cinematic solutions to stage ideas is most disappointing in a song about a slave auction - "Molasses to Rum" which never leaves the hall in Philadelphia), but that play does an astonishing job of creating suspense about an historically known outcome--the passing of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress on July 2, 1776.

2. Yankee Doodle Dandy - For the unreconstructed flag-wavers. What is about Michael Curtiz's movies that make them so re-watchable? Casablanca, Robin Hood, Mildred Pierce, this one--they never wear out their welcome. Curtiz was supposedly unable to talk to actors, but why do they provide such clear, economical and high-energy performances for him that they don't always provide for other directors? It doesn't matter anymore that the story is pure fiction or that Cagney hated Curtiz. The combining of those energies, together with a screenplay that is utterly relentless and uncompromising music and dance is irresistable. And Yankee Doodle Dandy, by resisting the conventions, especially musical conventions of its own time, has become timeless. (Can you imagine if the producers had insisted on adding a new song as they would today?)

3. The Music Man - Another filmed play, but the entire second half takes place on the Fourth of July. It celebrates and remembers small-town Fourths sort of the way I remember my own. And there's that strong, brassy music. Is it mere coincidence that Ray Heindorf was music director for Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Music Man AND 1776?

But there's a less conventional choice that I would like to urge you to try out in the days to come: Avalon the 1990 film by Barry Levinson. It is one of the finest films ever made about what it is to be an American. It is about 2-1/2 generations of an American Jewish family, beginning with the arrival of immigrant Sam Krachinski in the Avalon neighborhood of Baltimore on the Fourth of July at the turn of the century. He glows with wonder at the fireworks and supposes that this happens all the time in this wonderful country. His wonder and his pride never really fade away. America is truly a land of opportunity, of growth, development and improvement, even if Sam doesn't understand improvements like the difference between "can" and "may." Even the family councils, which continue to be maintained as the family stretches farther away from each other, feel like an echo of American democracy itself.

With time, the shine wears off for some of the rest of the family, as "being an American" comes to mean being a consumer and a television viewer. (Television is one of the main sub-threads of the story.)

The narrative revolves almost entirely around holidays, and mostly Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, underlining that the film is about being American, not about being Jewish. (Labor Day makes one guest appearance.) The cast is astonishing. This was my introduction to the brilliance of Armin Mueller-Stahl. (I will never forget how he sings under his breath, "We go to the river so we can sleep..") But Aidan Quinn, Kevin Pollak, Lou Jacobi ("You cut the toikey without me!"), Joan Plowright, Elizabeth Perkins and a very young Elijah Wood are all superb.

You will be entertained, provoked to thought and, if you are open to it, moved. Please see Avalon.

Stooges to the rescue

Though it's not really needed, Meet the Baron (1933) is further proof that the worst films can be made using the combination of the best talent, especially if there is no guidance. Credited writers on this film include Arthur Kober, Norman Krasna, and Herman J. Mankiewicz, all prestigious and successful writers--some even produced on Broadway. The director is Walter Lang, who made good musicals such as State Fair and The King and I and the producer is David O. Selznick of Gone With The Wind fame. Put them together in order to promote a second-tier radio comic, Jack Pearl and his character Baron Munchausen, (who faded from peak popularity within two years of the release of this movie) and you have a 70-minute time-filler whose best moments are provided by naked women (what else?) and The Three Stooges (really).

I am not one of those cases of arrested development who idolizes the Stooges. Sure, I grew up on them, but only because they were on TV during the witching hour after it was too dark to play outside and just before we sat up for dinner. But I never thought their comedy made any sense or was very funny, and have always preferred Laurel and Hardy and even Abbott and Costello as far as teams go.

As I've aged and seen more of their work, especially in support of other performers in feature films, I appreciate the precision and timing of their work as a team. Nobody mentions it, but the Stooges sing together very well--not as a joke, or to exhibit their characters, as L&H do, but as a matter of good music making. Their act, especially in their days with Ted Healy (as in Meet the Baron) was clearly partly improvisational, but they are always tight, picking up cues and moving deftly into place as needed. They were a well-oiled machine, and not as dependent on the silly sound effects devised for them at Columbia Pictures as they would appear to be. Moe in particular is a very skillful anchor man, keeping the act in constant motion, which makes up for the lack of character consistency or narrative logic in their routines. Even Edna May Oliver can smoothly dovetail her snooty old lady act with the Stooges.

By the way, this is the film with the sequence (see below) in which girls sing "Clean As A Whistle" while appearing to be naked behind curtains of water. The number doesn't end (how could it?) because they run out of water and send for the Stooges to solve the problem.



I mean, what are you going to do with a movie that can't even make Jimmy Durante funny?

Like a gate

When we think of musicals of Classical Hollywood, we go right to Meet Me In St. Louis, Singin' In The Rain and others now recognized as classics. For moviegoers of the 30s, 40s and 50s, a "musical" was as likely to be a melange of vaudeville like Swing Parade (1946). (Side note: All sources, including the Internet Movie Database and the Maltin Guide refer to this film as Swing Parade of 1946, but the onscreen title is simply Swing Parade.) The video above contains what is probably the highlight, Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five performing their hit "Caledonia."

Forget movies a minute, let me talk about the amazing Louis Jordan. This man is the missing link between big-band swing and early rock-and-roll. Where most small jazz groups of the era such as the John Kirby Sextet or the Nat King Cole Trio embraced their "smallness" and offered tight, intimate and very hip swing to their nightclub audiences, Jordan took all the energy and swagger of a 16-piece ballroom orchestra and somehow distilled all that into groups of 6 to 8 players. (He always called his group "The Tympany Five" no matter how many were in it.) And where others were sophisticated, Louis swung like a demon. One of the keys to this was focusing almost exclusively on the blues and blues-related bop. There were blues-oriented big bands. Count Basie, Chick Webb, Charlie Barnett and Woody Herman all had a solid base in the blues (and never discount Duke Ellington's band, which could play anything, but really knew their blues).

Over time, he developed a way of playing the blues with a shuffle beat under the vocal, which turns into a fierce backbeat in the instrumental, dance-0riented part of the song. The result is the roots of rhythm-and-blues, stemming from a fusion of big band and blues. The only thing Chuck Berry had to do was lose some of the horns (he occasionally retained the saxophone), drop the shuffle beat in favor of the backbeat and put his guitar work front and center. Big band to rock and roll in two quick steps and Louis Jordan is that middle step.

You can see Louis at the top of Swing Parade singing and playing "Don't You Worry About My Mule" and at about the 47-minute mark singing "Caledonia" (as in the clip above). Neither he nor singer Connee Boswell have any role in the movie other than to show up and perform a couple of tunes. The story is as follows: Phil Regan wants to open a nightclub in a property owned by his rich industrialist father. His father wants to serve a notice of eviction. That's it, that's the plot. The nightclub provides an excuse for a lot of numbers by Regan and Will Osborne's orchestra and about eight dancers who pop in and out. Actually, none of the tunes (which are a mixture of old and new) are bad, which is more than you can say for most musicals. There's a bit of dancing, including a bizarre moment in which star Gale Storm (yes, that's her name and she had two TV series of her own in the 1950s) pulls a random bespectacled audience member from his seat and they proceed to do a huge complex dance number together. There is no reason for this, but it's really fun.

Groovy as all this is, the only reason such a strange thing is likely to be unearthed at all (other than for the clip above) is the presence of the Three Stooges, who are moonlighting from their cheap Columbia shorts to this even cheaper Monogram feature. (Monogram was known for making features for less than $50,000 at a time when the average picture cost about $400,000.) I sought out this film because of seeing Dancing Lady a little while back, and it led me to wonder what they were like in other feature films. (Until the 1960s, when they were old and over-the-hill, the Stooges never starred in a feature of their own, but appeared strictly as comedy relief for others.) Unlike many raucous comics, the Stooges are rather good as supporting characters who do what they can to help the young lovers get together. In their salad days, MGM made the Marx Brothers do the same thing, and they always looked uncomfortable, as did Laurel & Hardy in their terrible 40s films for Fox. But the Stooges always seem to welcome a chance to stop hitting each other and be nice to other people. Moe was always excessively ingratiating to outside parties, and Curly and Larry's characters seemed genuinely nice.

So if you want to watch this movie just for Stooges, here's where you'll find them:
At approximately 3 minutes in, they're introduced, and return at about 10 minutes. There follows an incredible sequence in which Gail Storm, who has been tossed out by her landlady and is being allowed to stay in a spare room in the nightclub thinks that Phil Regan is preparing to join her in bed. She reluctantly gets into the pajamas being loaned to her, and then (at 24 minutes) in, passes out when the Three Stooges enter, all in nightshirts. I can't believe this gag got by the censors! (They were not the first comics to attempt a group sex joke--at the end of Horse Feathers, all four Marx Brothers marry Thelma Todd. That would have been the tiredest woman in the world!).

At 35 minutes in, Moe and Ed Brophy engage in a variation of the burlesque chestnut "Mustard"--this time with Roast Beef. At 51 minutes they begin a sequence of plumbing hi-jinks, with a pale echo of "A Plumbin' We Will Go." At 1:10 the Stooges appear in top hats and tails to join the company in a big finale.

The intricate plot described above is resolved in the space of about 45 seconds at around 1:05. Then, for no good reason, a kid called Windy Cook makes his one and only film appearance (according to the Internet Movie Database) as a busboy who can do Michael Winslow's sound-effects act from the Police Academy movies.

That's it. Compelling, no. Coherent, no. But you've spent an hour-and-a-quarter a lot worse ways in your life than sitting through Swing Parade.