133. Rebecca
Posted: June 30, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1001 Movies, Alfred Hitchcock, Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, Rebecca Leave a comment
The 1001 book claims that Welles got the idea for Kane‘s Xanadu from the monster Manderly estate in Rebecca. Clearly, that ain’t all. Rebecca feels more like a Welles movie than a Hitchcock: the stunning, chiaroscuro cinematography of George Barnes, the tight close-ups on faces with something to hide, and perhaps most memorably, the juxtaposition of happy, carefree “home movies” against a confrontation in the shadow of the projector.
In fact, while it’s a riveting movie, much of Hitchcock’s brio feels stifled, no doubt by producer David Selznick’s massive ego and control freakishness. Why else would it be overscored to soap opera levels, with swoony violins and Wurlitzer glissandos whenever Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) gets all creepy? Fortunately, Selznick was busy editing GWTW while Hitch was shooting, and the latter was smart enough to edit in camera – in other words, shoot only what he wanted in his final cut, so that there’d be no chance for Selznick to muck things up too badly in post production.
The 1001 book attributes the melodrama to Du Maurier, but I’d blame the producer. I haven’t read the novel, but Du Maurier’s short stories are small masterpieces of evocation; certainly the great movies made from her works, Hitch’s The Birds and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, tap into the author’s delicate handling of characters in permanent, quietly hostile mourning. It’s doubtless due to Hitchcock’s tight rein that the movie is as haunting and powerful as it is. And it’s not completely without humor. George Sanders plays a ne’er-do-well with his customary purr and swagger, and the scene where Mrs. Danvers lovingly fondles the late Rebecca’s underwear is high camp done executed with a straight face.
Meanwhile, Olivier is much better here than in Wuthering Heights; his feyness lends itself to Maxim de Winter’s dangerous charm, and he seems slippery enough to ensnare a young naive woman like the unnamed title character, a quality consistent with the book. He was apparently as disdainful of Joan Fontaine as he had been of Merle Oberon in the other movie, and he and Hitchcock were cruelly brusque with her throughout shooting; it’s no wonder the character’s nervous Nellyness is so effective, she was living the part.
But like her sister, Olivia de Havilland, Fontaine proves to be steely under pressure. When, after the famous costume party humiliation, she turns on her heel and immediately confronts Mrs. Danvers, you want to cheer. Of course, Mrs. D will turn the tables in a minute, but you can’t help but admire Fontaine’s considerable pluck in the face of massive odds stacked against her. And she’s brilliantly shot; one minute, she’s a little mouse who’s trying too hard, but the next, when she’s not trying at all, she’s beautiful.
Selznick won his Oscar for Best Picture and Barnes would take the cinematography prize, but Hitchcock got stiffed as director for the first but not last time. In truth, it was a bit of a nutty year, with Philadelphia Story, Grapes of Wrath, and Hitch’s own Foreign Correspondent also in the running, with John Ford taking home the director prize for Grapes. What matters most is that the movie was a hit and proved Hitchcock could bring in the bucks, setting him up in Hollywood to deliver some of the greatest movies ever made over the next decades. For that alone, Rebecca deserves the movie lover’s deep gratitude.
132. His Girl Friday
Posted: June 25, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1001 Movies, Cary Grant, His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks, movies as foreplay, Rosalind Russell Leave a comment
No question that the pairing of Cary Grant with Irene Dunne makes good fun sense, or that the combo with Katherine Hepburn is a delight. But Grant with Rosalind Russell? Inspired, perhaps divine. Dunne is smart and snarky, Kate exudes entitled rich girl loopiness. But nobody embodies tough, sexy career girl better than Roz. Lean as a wire in whip-smart houndstooth suits, she crackles to Grant’s snaps and pops, resulting in some of the greatest electricity ever recorded on film.
His Girl Friday has seen plenty of previous and post incarnations, beginning life as one more bromance – this time between hardened newsmen – threatened by an impending marriage. Written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, former reporters themselves, The Front Page began life as a smash Broadway hit, then became a movie that did well enough. But of course, in light of this brilliant remake, no one bothers to watch that version, and there’s certainly no need to look at any of the others, either (including the lackluster Switching Channels with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner).
Having perfected his trademark prestissimo tempo to a terrifying velocity, Howard Hawks’ most brilliant choice was to barely change any lines, but swap the gender of Hildy Johnson; the story is that he liked the way the dialogue sounded when read out loud by his female secretary. Grant had done the director proud in Only Angels Have Wings, and Hawks cast him right away. But actress after actress, including Dunne and Hepburn, turned down or was unavailable for the part. Russell, who’d gotten her break playing the bitchy Sylvia in The Women the year before, was a ways down the list and annoyed about it. But she brought her feistiness to the set, along with lines from a writer she hired privately to beef up the role (actresses who’d turned it down, including Jean Arthur, had done so because it was considered too paltry).
Grant didn’t need a writer. Some of his funniest lines – including the superb meta touch when he says that Ralph Bellamy, playing a hapless straight man yet again, looks like “that actor, what’s his name?, Ralph Bellamy” – are his own, and were no doubt deliberately thrown in to keep people on their toes. At one point, he mentions Archie Leach, his own real name, as a fellow who suffered a ghastly fate.
It’s all unbelievably fast. The 191-page script plays out in 92 minutes, a speed that must have felt sadistic, or at the very least, breathless to the actors. But Grant and Russell, anyway, appear to be having the time of their lives, and nuts to anyone who can’t keep up. And the warp speed gets cranked up even higher by Hawks’ pioneering work in sound mixing. Wanting the newsrooms to sound as realistic as possible, he had the sound mixer onset (an uncredited Lodge Cunningham is listed on the imdb) to switch different mics on and off, resulting in a rich and complex audio texture that surely inspired masters of overlapping dialog to come like Altman and Cassavetes.
For smart women who would much rather go head to head with their partner than be swept off their feet, it’s the ultimate romance; one friend noted the other night that when she and her husband went at it a la Roz and Cary, it was better foreplay than a boob grab. The sooner men across the world realize this, the more everyone will get laid. Watch and learn, fellas. Watch and learn.
His Girl Friday
Buy the DVD from Amazon.
131. Wuthering Heights
Posted: June 7, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1001 Movies, Gregg Toland, Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, Wuthering Heights 1939 Leave a comment
“The immortal classic from the Master Producer
Samuel Goldwyn
The Greatest Love Story of Our Time
Or Any Time!”
Thus bellows the trailer for Wuthering Heights, a cranky, galumphing warhorse, the trailer itself a near tantrum over the fact that this movie is no Gone with the Wind.
Not for lack of trying – but certainly, Goldwyn must have spent a lot of time kicking himself over a missed casting opportunity. Conceived all along as a vehicle for Merle Oberon, Heights would get saddled with the patrician-boned Laurence Olivier to play Heathcliff. Oberon is spirited enough as Cathy. But you can’t help wondering what might have been if Olivier and his girlfriend, Viven Leigh, had gotten their way and replaced Oberon with her. Goldwyn refused; Leigh was too unknown. He offered her a bit part, she turned it down, and you know the rest.
The stars hated each other. In fact, Olivier was not anyone’s favorite guy, with his divatude and hammy, cheap seats acting – at least, that’s how it appeared on film until director William Wyler got him to take things down a notch. The director patiently required take after take, dealing with hissy fits throughout, though Olivier would credit Wyler with teaching him how to act for films in his biography.
But Olivier is one of those actors I can’t stand – I always tell you these things up front. I base this partially on what I consider one of the great disservices to Shakespeare in history, the actor/director’s dreadful Hamlet, which starts with a premise that is such an unfounded and stupid reading of the text – oh hell, just writing about it gets the old dander up. Anyway, I think he’s woefully miscast as Heathcliff. He’s got skinny legs, and putting shoe polish on his hair hardly does the trick of turning him into Emily Brontë’s brooding gypsy. In the 1001 book, R. Barton Palmer says that “Heathcliff’s speech about the life they will live together is one of the most poignant moments in any Hollywood film.” To each his own.
Given that Oberon shared my opinion, it’s little wonder that the pair have absolutely zero screen chemistry, and the movie feels long and sloggy. Gregg Toland won an Oscar for his cinematography; it’s solid work, though in light of Citizen Kane two years later, not revelatory. But giving Toland an Oscar is always a good thing in my book, so huzzah for that. And the movie did do very well with critics and audiences. Selznik would always claim it as his favorite, stating, “I made Wuthering Heights. Wyler only directed it.” The fact that he also reportedly said (about an unnamed subject), “I don’t think anybody should write his autobiography until after he’s dead,” may provide a clue as to what we’re dealing with.
1939: a helluva year, one that defined, from then and for a good while longer, what Hollywood meant by “success.” Into the 40s we go. I”m ready.
And, should you beg to differ, by all means, buy the DVD: Wuthering Heights (Import, All Regions)
130. La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game)
Posted: June 4, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Cinema 1001, Jean Renoir, Rules of the Game Leave a comment
Always fascinated by the small overlap but greater divide between the rich and everyone else, Renoir created this masterpiece two years after Grand Illusion. Like Citizen Kane, it’s immediately compelling, kicking off with a news conference in which a pilot cannot celebrate his victory in crossing the Atlantic because the woman he loves isn’t there to greet him. Fortunately, we don’t have to watch him whine for long at all before Renoir himself steps in, playing Octave.
Like Lophakin in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard – a play that resembles the movie, in tone if not plot, to a stunning degree – Octave straddles the two classes. He easily merges with the downstairs crowd, who include a maid, her crazy jealous husband, and Marceau, a guy who proves that the more one is up to no good, the more fun one will have. But the upstairs folks include Octave almost as readily, or as readily as their more opaque restrictions will allow. Renoir cast himself well, traversing the divide with a lumbering, bearish grace.
I’ve yet to find a link between Chekhov and Renoir; the filmmaker cited Beaumarchais, de Mariveaux and de Musset as inspirations if not direct sources for this film, in which he sought to depart from the realism of his previous efforts (in addition to Illusion, La Bete Humaine and Marseillaise) and create a comedy of manners. The connection between the Russian and the Frenchman is doubtless due to circumstance and approach. Both artists document, with compassionate but unsparing insight, an old world crumbling to make way for an uncertain future. The rich indulge in willful oblivion, like children who believe that, as long as they keep their eyes closed, no one else will see that they’re naked. The servants, grounded in the reality of work, are almost as easily distracted. Across the divide, both groups have a deep hunger for good sex, music, dancing, and food, or at least the hope of finding them. But there’s little joy in the search.
Renoir would pay for calling it as he saw it with such devastating accuracy. In the Criterion edition (linked above), a wealth of ancillary materials include footage of him discussing how the critical and public reception of Rules ranged from tepid to hostile. For decades, the movie was available at several different run times, as Renoir and others chopped the poor thing up to try to make it more palatable and commercial. Banned by the French and Vichy governments as demoralizing, bombed, literally, during the war and thought lost forever, Renoir was finally able to restore the film to 106 minutes and his original intentions in 1959. Thank God.
It consistently ranks as one of the greatest films of all time. It was certainly innovative, particularly in regard to cinematography (a team headed by Jean-Paul Alphen and Jean Bachelet) and editing (Marthe Huguet and Renoir’s longtime companion Marguerite), areas the Criterion disc covers in-depth. Personally, I place it above Grand Illusion; I’ve already expressed that I’m not thrilled with Renoir’s stated opinion that WWI was somehow noble. There are no such illusions in Rules, where bleakness is balanced against the clumsy tenderness embodied in Octave. A haunting, deeply honest work of art.
129. Ninotchka
Posted: June 3, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1001 Movies, Cinema 1001, Ernst Lubitsch, Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Ninotchka Leave a comment
“Do you want to be alone, komrade?”
“No.”
The consummate artist, Greta Garbo understood that comedy requires an utter lack of vanity. Not only does she allow her infamous desire for solitude to be mocked more than once in Ninotchka, she wears a dour expression that, in addition to a borderline frumpy hairstyle, emphasizes the severity of her face rather than its beauty. The result is that, in the picture with the famous tagline “Garbo Laughs!”, you’re laughing a long time before she does. She’s brilliantly funny.
It’s a great movie. Triumphantly uniting Garbo with Ernst Lubitsch for the first and only time – they had long hoped to work together – Ninotchka boldly skewers Soviet communism and Stalin. Even Lenin is subjected to the indignity of his stern portrait suddenly breaking into a dopey grin. Billy Wilder wrote it along with Charles Brackett; certainly, the razor-slice wordplay must have come from the great future director rather than the guy who would eventually give us silly potboilers like the 1953 Titanic and Niagara, but that doesn’t diminish a fine partnership that resulted in a sparkling, light speed comedy. And it’s beautifully cast as well. The three hapless komrades kick things up with grand ineptitude and are played by the wonderful character actors Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart, and Alexander Granach. Ina Claire is gloriously bitchy and Bela Lugosi doesn’t seem like a vampire at all.
Most exciting to watch is Melvyn Douglas. If you’ve ever seen any of his screen tests for Gone with the Wind – he barely missed getting the part of Ashley Wilkes – you wonder why in the hell they cast Lesley Howard, who hated the movie and the role. People of my generation know Douglas for his superb portrayal of the kingmaker at the end of his life in Hal Ashby’s Being There, and it’s not so easy to imagine him as a debonair, sexy guy. But here, that’s exactly what he is, and it’s no wonder Garbo falls for him. The two have wonderful chemistry, and they’d in fact reunite for Two-Faced Woman.
Not a flop by any means, that comedy, Garbo’s second, was also her last – and her last movie, period. There was a war on, she was homesick, and she was 36, way over the hill for a woman of the time. That timing makes Ninotchka even more precious. Capping the extraordinary Hollywood year of 1939, it’s a shining monument to the power of laughing at the right time. And Garbo, always in control, left us wanting more. Beautifully played, Miss Gustafsson.
Read an analysis of Garbo’s appeal at I Heart Ingrid.
Buy a spectacular Garbo set that includes Ninotchka, Camille, Queen Christina, and more.
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