They Were Collaborators #219
James Dean and Sal Mineo
for the series:
They Were Collaborators
October 31, 2006
The Art of the Centerfold #29
Jennifer Jackson
(Miss March, 1965)
for the series:
Art of the Centerfold
October 30, 2006
Seminal Image #542
El Espíritu de la colmena
(The Spirit of the Beehive)
(Victor Erice; 1973)
for the series:
Seminal Images
October 29, 2006
October 27, 2006
Movie of the Week #15
Max reprend sa liberté
(Troubles of a Grass Widower)
(Max Linder; 1912)
The beauty of this affable domestic morality play by Max Linder rests entirely with the actor/director's seemingly inexhaustible ability to balance his ineffably graceful screen presence against the stock character of a less than competent husband, consigned to his own dysfunctional devices after the wife runs home to Mother. Linder's comedies were always like this; forever two steps less unhinged, even in their slapstick elements, than the lovely knockabout grotesquerie of Keystone; and with a shade more emphasis on character. Though never as wildly successful in the States as the pantheon comics (Chaplin, Arbuckle, Keaton, Lloyd, etc), each of these eminences nevertheless took away something from Linder's work, without which their work, indeed the soul of American screen comedy itself, would have assumed a very different, possibly less charming form.
for the series:
Movies of the Week
Poets are both clean and warm
And most are far above the norm
Whether here or on the roam
Have a poet in every home! #12
Dr. William Carlos Williams
for the series:
Poets are both clean and warm
Similar Images #3
Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler
(Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler)
(Fritz Lang; 1922)
Gold Diggers of 1935
(Busby Berkeley; 1935)
for the series:
Similar Images
October 26, 2006
The Lonesome Art of Don Siegel
Think of it this way: If our life is full of reconciliations and trade-offs great and small; if it's really marked by the things we settle for, rather than those we aspire to, then no artist in American Cinema made a greater exploration of that principle than Don Siegel; born on this day in 1912.
Like most of this country's great filmmaking voices, Siegel built the house of his art upon the foundation of genre cinema, yet always infusing it with a dimension of drear reality, an everyday torpor and absence of charm that just missed the shores of ugliness and sleaze. The Dramatis personae of Andre de Toth's or Phil Karlson's movies may have dwelled in the harshest corners of human motivation, but Siegel's characters wouldn't travel to the worst in themselves without a good, hard shove by events outside all control. In a Siegel film, it was always just the way things were. This is an approach to storytelling which has virtually disappeared in the face of gleeful postmodernist pursuits (which admittedly are not without their charms), and for me it grows more conspicuous through its absence with every passing season; hence this small tribute to Don Siegel we offer you today.
My thanks to the great Jeff Duncanson of Filmscreed for letting me know what day it was!
for the series:
Tribute
Adventures in American Filmmaking #63
Today's Adventure: Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre look on as Don Siegel
reads the screenplay for The Verdict (1946)
for the series:
Adventures in American Filmmaking
They Were Collaborators #217
David Weisbart, Col. Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and Don Siegel
for the series:
They Were Collaborators
Adventures in American Filmmaking #62
Today's Adventure: Don Siegel looks down on his leads while shooting
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
for the series:
Adventures in American Filmmaking
This is the City . . . #2
Los Angeles County General Hospital (1956)
for the series:
This is the City . . .
When Legends Gather #170
Donald Cammell, Dennis Hopper, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Kenneth Anger in London in 1971.
for the series:
When Legends Gather
October 25, 2006
The Art of Cinema #165
The Wizard of Oz
(Victor Flemming, Mervyn LeRoy, King Vidor & Richard Thorpe; 1939)
for the series:
Art of Cinema
October 24, 2006
The Charlie Parker Anniversary Waltz
Do I look like Charlie Parker to you, pilgrim?
Christ, what a lame way to start a blog, no?
But what could anyone have expected? It was early in the morning, October 24, 2004 and, as usual, I couldn't sleep a wink. To this moment I don't know exactly what it was; perhaps all that talk about the rise of the blogosphere during the 2004 Presidential election, when a raft of intrepid (albeit right wing) bloggers brought down the once-mighty Dan Rather of CBS News over some harebrained, forged documents pertaining to . . .
Whatever.
The point is, I started this blog on an impulse; no more than that. I had no plan, no formula. If I knew anything to a certainty, it was what I didn't want to do; namely take whomever wandered into the thing through some leaden, day-by-day account of life in the Community Television racket, where I make what it pleases me to call my living. Public Affairs television is dreary enough to watch; who on God's green earth wants to read about its creation? Damn skippy, no one does; and, what's more, I knew it from the get-go. I started posting images simply because I had them on my harddrive by the hundreds (now they number in the thousands) and it was easier to do. All very Andy of me; in keeping with the above image.
Oh, I had vague intentions of writing here occasionally (something I was not doing much of then), but only that. My first choice for a title was from an old Frank Zappa composition, Nasal Retentive Calliope Music. But when it came time to typing it in to the Blogger form, I went with something else. As I'm wont to do of a sleepless early morn' I was blasting music through my headphones; Charles Mingus, as it turned out. And one of the pieces on the CD I'd been cranking was Gunslinging Bird. I remembered Mingus's provisional title for the piece and . . . here you have it.
If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats celebrates its two-year anniversary today. Speaking solely for myself, this blog has somewhat sustained me through some rather evil patches, morale-wise. Many times it's been a chronic pain in the neck . . . particularly when I'm behind on regular series such as Hitchcock/Truffaut . . . but more often I've thought of it with a rather odd species of affection. I truly did not believe it would ever last this long; and I daresay without the contributions, generally better than my own, of Stephen Cooke (who joined me in February of 2005), and Richard Gibson (who signed on in June of this year) it would have been gone inside of a year. At the risk of engaging in showbiz blather and false modesty (at worst it is anything but false), I think whatever character of success we've achieved in this production has been as much a consequence of their effort as mine. This is more than to say I could not have done it without them. I should not have.
I thank them both, equally, for that.
Speaking for my co-bloggers . . . and without, I hope, turning hopelessly maudlin on you . . . I want to extend thanks to our regular visitors and comment-providers (with special thanks to our earliest and best contributor in that respect, Rob Carver . . . aka, Vanwall), along with many of our very fine blogging confreres (Dennis Cozzalio, Sheila O'Malley, Andy Horbal, Flickhead, Ivan Shreve, Steve Carlson, David Hudson, Girish Shambu, Glenn Erickson, Jeff Duncanson, Tim Lucas, That Little Round Headed Boy, Andy Rector, John McElwee, Jim Emerson, Sam Johnson, Zach Campbell, Brent McKee, Mark over at Movie Masterworks . . . this is a list which could go on and on; with the unnamed finding no less appreciation than the named) for their support and encouragement, their links, their respect. More is thy due than we can pay, no doubt . . . but we will do our damnedest.
I guess this is the point where I promise great things for the future, right? Vast improvements, new features, more and more and more; all that New Frontier, John F. Kennedy jive?
I'll say this: We're going to keep doing what we're doing. No more, no less. We'll try everything we can think of, certainly. And some of it will no doubt be as lame as that first post; but if we're lucky we might just maintain a consistent level of quality in this corner of the blogosphere and, it is my hope, prove ourselves worthy of another two years of your very welcome attention.
Thank you again,
Tom Sutpen
Seminal Image #537
Ore ni sawaru to abunaize
(Don't Touch Me, I'm Dangerous; a.k.a. Black Tight Killers)
(Yasuharu Hasebe; 1966)
for the series:
Seminal Images
October 23, 2006
Artists in Action #119
Marilyn Monroe reads Ulysses.
My sincere thanks to Mark at Movie Masterworks for this superb image.
for the series:
Artists in Action
October 22, 2006
The Ink & Paint Set #15
Victor McLaglen in Have You Got Any Castles?
(Frank Tashlin; 1938)
for the series:
The Ink and Paint Set
Collect 'Em All #14
Spike Milligan
No. 29 out of 48 in Merrysweets' Telegum TV Stars series
"Born Ahmadnager, India, 1918. Did various odd jobs before joining the army as a Bombadier. When demobbed Spike decided to write for a living and submitted two scripts to the B.B.C. One of the scripts scored a hit and in 1951 The Goon Show came into being. Since then he has written and appeared in I.T.V.'s 'A Show Called Fred' and 'Son of Fred.'"
for the series:
Collect 'em All
Artists in Action #118
Twiggy performs on BBC's Top of the Pops sometime in the 1970's.
for the series:
Artists in Action
October 21, 2006
October 20, 2006
October 19, 2006
The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #11
Call me a skeptic, but Alfred Hitchcock's rationale, the one he would admit to, for directing a textbook Screwball Comedy by Norman Krasna entitled Mr. and Mrs. Smith has always struck me as extremely dubious. To hear him tell it in Part Eleven of The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes, it was all the doing of Carole Lombard. She simply asked him to direct a film for her and . . . in what Hitchcock calls "a weak moment" . . . he did it. Just like that.
While Hitchcock had far greater respect for actors than he ever let on (a self-constructed myth discussed in this excerpt), it's hard to imagine an artist of his single-mindedness directing anything at the request of an actor or a producer or . . . anyone; absent some form of contractual obligation. George Cukor? Sure. Hawks? Hmmm. Maybe. Hitchcock?? It doesn't wash.
Barring a barefoot run through RKO Production records, I'm left to surmise his true intent for taking on the project. To me his participation in Mr. and Mrs. Smith had more to do with re-establishing in Hollywood what had always been a crucial part of his filmmaking in Britain, now that it looked as though he was over here for good. During the 20s and 30s, Hitchcock was usually able to weave his creative identity out of the Suspense pieces he'd achieved great success with and take up different narrative forms almost at will. Sometimes the results were utterly disastrous (Waltzes from Vienna, for instance; which was a failure on every level), but more often (the sublime Rich and Strange, or vastly underestimated works such as Juno and the Paycock, The Manxman, The Skin Game, The Farmer's Wife and Easy Virtue) they were anything but. What's more, the commercial Thrillers that heralded the dawn of his world-wide recognition were generally suffused with elements (mostly comic, but not always) that had little to do with that form as audiences knew it, then or now. He was, in short, a much more adroit and varied filmmaker in England . . . . this is not, necessarily, to say that he was a better one (which I don't believe) . . . than he was ever permitted to be in the US.
Why the leash? It was mainly institutional. America's film industry was structured in such a way as to deter, as much as possible, any impulse toward creative risk. It was a counter-impulse rather than a mechanized function. If a certain director . . . even a relatively autonomous director like Cecil B. DeMille, let's say . . . had a firmly established commercial track record with a specific kind of motion picture, then those with an overdeveloped sense of duty to the stockholders saw no point in encouraging said director to try their hand at anything else. Which is not to say that every filmmaker worthy of our attention didn't attempt to wrest themselves from the niches they themselves had created (such struggles are nothing less than the history of American Cinema), its simply that the economics of the industry weren't geared toward versatility then. They aren't now, either.
In the case of Alfred Hitchcock, he tried several times in his Hollywood career to reclaim some measure of this long-ago versatility, but he could only succeed insofar as he buried it within his commercially-proven Suspense model. On those rare occasions when he boldly tried something different (though one might argue that the basic elements, as it were, of his ebullient black-comedy pastorale, 1955's The Trouble With Harry were in his work all along) he was met with the uncomprehending stares of a nation.
After this intriguing opening, marked as it is by a rather odd tirade about stage actors and 'New York' writers who work in the film industry solely for financial inducements, the excerpt moves into a discussion of Joan Fontaine and his 1941 film Suspicion that . . . save for an entertaining (if not altogether believeable) anecdote about that film's momentary fate at the hands of Sol Lesser when he ran RKO Pictures for a half-hour . . . is sheer Snoresville.
for the series:
The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes
October 18, 2006
Artists in Action #117
Lt. James Reese Europe conducts his 369th Infantry Regiment, the Harlem
Hellfighters, at an outdoor performance somewhere in the middle of Paris.
for the series:
Artists in Action
The Art of the Piano #11
The Mardi Gras March and Two Step
(by William A. Corey)
(E.T. Paull Music Co.; 1897)
for the series:
Art of the Piano
October 17, 2006
October 16, 2006
Blog-a-thon Entry #3:
Some Remarks on Robert Aldrich's Attack (1956)
I don't know if there's any way I can state the following without sounding a craven, rationalizing fool, so I'll just have to risk it. What a few of you are about to read is something I wrote very quickly, within the last 24 hours; and under normal circumstances I would not regard this a piece finished to my satisfaction. But I did want to participate in the Aldrich Blog-a-thon today, so I'm posting it with this caveat. It is at best a draft of something I may re-visit in the future, no more than that.
Since we have that out of the way, here 'tis:
When Jack Palance's Lieutenant Joe Costa suddenly returns from what seemed a certain death in Robert Aldrich's Attack (1956) – his left arm hanging lifeless, rendered to ground beef by the tread of a German tank – he becomes, through a fateful marriage of Joseph Biroc's noirish lighting scheme and Palance's one-of-a-kind cheekbones, a gargoyle; an insane, barely ambulatory throwback to the resurrected war dead of Abel Gance's J'Accuse, only here wielding a much more narrow indictment. He has sworn to almighty God to use what minutes of life are left within him to once and for all rid the world of Captain Erskine Cooney (Eddie Albert), the equally insane Commander of Fox Company whose repeated, last-minute withdrawals of tactical and artillery support have resulted in nearly two dozen needless combat deaths.
It's not that Cooney does this out of total incompetence. Screenwriter James Poe (adapting Norman Brooks' stage play Fragile Fox) portrays Capt. Cooney as a more than adequate strategist, good at both forging a plan of action on short notice and maintaining the bearing of a Commander in the United States Infantry . . . at least when he’s not under any stress. When it comes time for him to saddle up the reserve and join those forces he’s already committed to the fray, forget it. He instantly falls to pieces, starts guzzling Bourbon, goes catatonic or murmurs with growing insistence about pulling back, surrendering.
Cooney doesn't really belong anywhere near a Commissioned rank in this man’s Army, and not just because of his open displays of physical cowardice. More than anyone in the film, he's got 'Civilian' written all over him. Vain, self pitying, overly sensitive to the slightest criticism (however justified), he also has all the flabby gregariousness of a small-town businessman whose most fearsome tests of mettle prior to this have been with his local Chamber of Commerce (indeed, Cooney at one point laments the un-businesslike inefficiency of the Army). "Who wants this?", he weeps near the end, while the mortar shells fall and his sanity is about to expire for good. “I didn’t ask for this.” Which is absolutely true. His Captaincy was, for all intent, presented to him gift-wrapped by Lt. Col. Clyde Bartlett (Lee Marvin) as a favor to Cooney's father, a local Judge and ruler of a political fiefdom back in Kentucky that holds the key to Bartlett's ambitions once the small matter of the War is behind them all. Bartlett is none too thrilled with having to carry this big baby through the charade of making him look like an officer, but it has to be done. If he’d only stop committing entire platoons to combat right before every ounce of nerve flees from his being, thereby insuring the deaths of far too many, then they could go on about their hideously corrupt scheme and no one would be any the wiser.
Elaborating somewhat on Samuel Fuller’s pulp war picture template (itself a jaundiced twist on the terse lyricism of films such as William Wellman's Battleground), Robert Aldrich skillfully injects a measure of ambiguity in Attack – a film that might have been, in other hands, a live-action EC War Comic on the order of Two-Fisted Tales – without ever threatening to derail the story’s immediate, visceral impact. When you think about it, this was not a small achievement. Pulp melodramas, after all, do not bear subtleties and refinement with much ease. That’s just their nature. And like all such narratives, the conflict between Capt. Cooney and Lt. Costa, which is the core of Attack, is as fertile a field for action-packed histrionics as a filmmaker was likely to find. Yet somehow, in opting for a strategy of what we might call Serial Nuance, portraying his chief antagonists as both seriously flawed human beings as well as victims of rough equivalence, Aldrich manages to enhance, rather than mute, his film’s polemical thrust.
For despite the monstrous nature of his deeds, Capt. Cooney is not a monster. Aldrich and Poe make this clear. Cooney is a man whose personal agenda – he's gone along with this squalid setup mainly to come out at the other end with a fraudulent medal; one he hopes will redeem him in the eyes of his old man – has forced him to make deadly common cause with Bartlett's more mendacious ambition. And it's getting a lot of U.S. Infantrymen killed as a result. His awareness of his own guilt in this regard is enormous (there are times when he can barely look anyone, even his subordinates, in the eye for more than two seconds), and it only gives nourishment to the demons that brought him to this hellish state in the first place. "I'll bet Cooney never figured on a war when he joined that National Guard unit", Costa reflects with great bitterness early on. "He probably thought it was going to be all Cornpone and Chitlins and . . . ", he pauses for a second; as if, in regarding the irony, he suddenly perceives a tragic dimension to the man he hates which he neither anticipated nor wants. " . . . and a chance to wear his uniform at the Saturday Fox hunt."
But if Cooney's guilt is rapidly consuming him, Costa's hatred of Cooney is just as rapidly turning him into something of a maniac. After a classic Aldrich prologue depicting the mortal consequences of Cooney’s garish inaction, Costa enters a perpetually simmering state of rage and stays there. He knows why Cooney is where he is in the Command structure (Bartlett’s post-war ambitions are an open secret among the officers), and he knows that no amount of wanton bloodshed born of bad leadership will remove him. When the tired, depleted Fox Company is once again called to action, Costa sees that the only thing to do, short of killing Cooney outright, is put the fear of God into him. He threatens his Commander’s life before witnesses; swearing that if he “plays the gutless wonder” once more, he’ll shove a grenade down his throat and pull the pin. When Cooney not only turns chicken again but descends into abject, gibbering psychosis (and from there into flat-out sadism), Costa goes off another, perhaps deeper end: performing acts of extreme, almost lunatic physical bravery for the sole purpose of getting back so he can put a round between the Captain’s eyes.
In their 1995 study, Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?, James Ursini and Alain Silver ungrammatically detect a common element in this state of affairs (“Costa’s rage is as inappropriate to a field officer as is Cooney’s terror”) and . . . run like hell from it. To me, however, it’s a point that should not rest without comment. The notion that Cooney’s extreme cowardice and Costa’s relative absence of same are both manifestations of the same madness was no doubt a difficult one for viewers to accept at first blush. Then and now, people are more naturally inclined to see the latter as admirable and the former as beneath contempt. Additionally, the film’s clear suggestion that this lunacy is endemic to militarism on a basic institutional level was so new to American cinema, it seemed almost nihilistic (which is no doubt why the Defense Department flatly refused to cooperate with the production on any level).
Attack has long been considered one of the few genuine anti-war statements to emerge from Hollywood which, if true, is a remarkable status given the film’s setting: the European theater of combat in the closing months of World War II. It was, as we know, the largest military engagement in our history, supported by all Americans save for Quakers, Pacifists, The Nation of Islam and native Fascists whose sympathies had always been with the Third Reich. If there was ever (to use Studs Terkel’s phrase) a ‘Good War’, a war waged at least in part against an enemy force that richly deserved its total annihilation, this was it.
Like all media during our involvement in that conflict, the American film industry unhesitatingly gave itself over to the production of Propaganda works at the behest of the War Department and the Office of War Information; mainly, but not always, for the purposes of boosting morale both on the front-line and here at home. It was all about creating a righteous image of unlimited American determination and sacrifice; a cult of mutual cooperation that would see us through to a victory which would justly be ours. Movies of that time (and by no means was this limited to war pictures) reflected a monolithic, wholly nationalized sense of esprit de corps where such phenomena as internecine conflict in the ranks or even vaguely pacifist sentiment could never be alluded to. This wasn’t a method of insuring that everyone was on the same page. It was a compulsive denial that any other page existed.
Prior to WWII, there had been a fair amount of antiwar sentiment in American cinema, largely in embarrassed remembrance of the bloodthirsty xenophobic material in Propaganda films of the Great War – a model best typified by Erich von Stroheim’s hurling an infant out a window in the midst of a rape scene in Allen Holubar’s The Heart of Humanity. Drawing its aura of grief, in the main, from such works as Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth (“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?/Only the monstruous anger of the guns./Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle/Can patter out their hasty orisons”), the inherently pacifist character of Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front or Stuart Walker’s The Eagle and the Hawk or Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby may have been the polar opposite of cinematic rallying cries of the Second World War, but their spirit of protest was mournful rather than enraged. These films were elegies, they were not bills of indictment.
There’s absolutely nothing elegiac about Attack. Setting its central conflict deep within the American Army’s officer class during the least controversial military engagement in its history, exploring the underlying insanity at the heart of all warfare, seeing it as an institution virtually designed to exploit the absolute worst in everyone it touches, Robert Aldrich emerged with nothing less than the most radical war picture of the 1950s.