My February movie-watching
Mar 01 '05 (Updated May 24 '08)
The Bottom Line The end of the month was heavy with adaptations of stageplays. The revelations included "Tape" and the voice of the "It Girl."
Wracking my brain to try to recall all the movies that I saw in 2004 led to a resolve to list the ones I see in 2005, a resolve that has lasted two whole months! Besides February being the shortest month, I was gone half the month (and sick another quarter of it).
Again, making the list led to writing a few sentences and writing a few sentences led to some express reviews I never would have written had I not been compiling the list (and a few express reviews outgrew their containers). The list, like the one for January, is in chronological order of the movies' making. Comments longer than a paragraph are set off by "---".
Call Her Savage (1932, directed by John Francis Dillon). Discussion of my review of Beneath the 12-Mile Reef made me curious to see an early sound film with Gilbert Roland (playing a halfbreed" named Moonglow), plus I'd only see the "It Girl," Clara Bow, in one silent movie (the first to ever win a best-picture Oscar, "Wings"). Roland is not onscreen through most of the movie. Once Bow appears (after an opening scene of her grandfather's harlotry in a wagon train segueing into an Indian attack and the next generation making love not war...), Bow is in every scene, playing Nasa Springer. She first appears being thrown from a horse that shied from a rattle-snake. Infuriated, Bow whips the snake until it retreats, then whips Roland for laughing at the spectacle. After her energy momentarily flags, her father asks why she was whipping him and she replies "I was practicing in case I get married someday."
Then there is a romantic puppy love interlude with Moonglow (Roland), followed by very intense rough-housing with a Great Dane (large enough to put its front paws over her shoulders when standing on its hind legs). Some 1930s viewers interpreted that as indicating Nasa had an ongoing sexual relationship with the dog. There is something extreme and erotic about it, whatever the inferences audiences were supposed to draw.
Her father tells her he has given up trying to tame her and is shipping her off to a school for delinquent girls (of rich families) in Chicago. There, to avoid marrying her father's choice of a suitable groom (the scion of a business associate), she marries a snooty, lecherous, rich cad, Lawrence Crosby (Monroe Owsley)—who is punishing a mistress by marrying "Dynamite," as Nasa has come to be called in the local newspapers. Nasa and the woman Crosby has been maintaining in high style, Sunny DeLan (Thelma Todd) had already come to blows at Nasa's coming-out party. Sunny asked Nasa if she is aware that Nasa has wrecked her home. Nasa sneered back, "I didn't know you had been in a home. When did they let you out?" Thelma also told Nasa ("Dynamite") that she has survived many explosion. Nasa firing back "That explains why you are so terribly scarred" triggered the physical fight between the unladylike women).
Crosby stays out most of their wedding night and leaves again before dawn, makes it clear that he is not going to be tied down or questioned and continues to care far more for Sunny than for his bride. Though separated the morning after the wedding, he supports her lavish spending. (Depression? What Depression?)
His lawyer tells Mrs. Crosby that her husband is dying in New Orleans and is begging to see her before he dies. She goes and is raped by him. (It looked like a failed rape, but she drops a baby after the only fight in the movie she does not win.)
Apparently, he cut off funds to her and divorced her (without paying child support?!?), because she is next seen in a tenement with her baby and seemingly working the streets. While she is out, the baby is incinerated. Meanwhile, back in Texas, her father has died and left her a hundred grand.
She hires Jay Randall (Anthony Jowitt), the heir of some other fortune to show her around the Big Apple (he does not reveal his identity to her). Slumming in Greenwich Village there is a mincing semi-drag show and soon there is a fight—in which shows she has not lost her punch. She gets into another fight when her beau's father throws a dinner party to which he invites her ex-husband and Sunny.
All her wildness is then explained by her dying mother (in a single word) and after another horse ride, there is a tender closing scene with Roland.
Through the verbal and physical comedy, the romances, and the lurching soap opera heartbreaks, Bow is phenomenal. The sins of the father visited on later generation along with some racial nonsense is presented as determining Nasa's character. Her temper is quick and fierce, but she is not "wild" in the sense of promiscuous (her streetwalker phase is to support the baby), and her character is not at all one that fits with the model of determinism the movie pushes (rather, she should have turned out laconic and promiscuous to illustrate the causation the models posited).
Bow showed she could do comedy, romance, melodrama (and could punch!). Her voice was fine: although she did not sound Texan, she didn't sound Brooklynish, either. I don't know why having made the transition to talkies, her career ended (with only one more movie the next year, de facto retiring at age 26, having been in 58 movies). Her look was more jazz age than 1930s, and much of the behavior shown in the movie (starting with her grandfather's dalliance with a woman not his wife, and including Sunny reminding Crosby that he'd come back to her because she catered to his kinks) could not be shown in Hollywood movies after mid-1934, when the Production Code began to be enforced, but there could have been more pre-Code romps before then. Alas, there weren't.
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Since watching Kon Ichikawa's awesome Tokyo Olympiad before last summer's Athens Olympics, I'd been meaning to take another look at Leni Riefenstahl's (1937, 4.5 stars) classic Olympia. Some of the filming of events in Riefenstahl's pioneering documentary is routine now, but these are the events in which black Americans trounced "the master race" while Hitler's favorite (still-resident) director recorded them. Both of the great Olympics documents have pole-vaulting competitions running into the night and seemingly beyond human endurance (the other is Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olymiad, documenting the 1964 games). Neither film is remotely close to the chauvinism of American televising of recent Olympics. Riefenstahl celebrated athletic bodies of all races and downplayed German successes.
Cornered (directed by Edward Dmytryk, 1945, 3.4 stars) must be one of the first movies about hunting down Nazis (and, in this instance, French collaborators) who had escaped to South America. Dick Powell played an American flyer who had married a French resistance fighter who had been slain. More than a little crazed he goes to Buenos Aires, where Walter Slezak plays games with him and the Nazi network and the anti-Nazi network. The plot is oscillates between opaque and implausible, but there's some great noir photography and Powell in Phillip Marlowe mood, getting knocked about and fooled, but persisting.
Road House (directed by Jean Negulesco, 1948, 4 stars) backwoods (close to the Canadian border) noir with a nightclub/bowling alley owned by Jefty (Richard Widmark) and managed by his lifelong friend Pete (Richard Conte). Widmark brings in Lily, a very tough torch singer without much of a voice (Ida Lupino). Conte wants to get rid of her, which is a sure sign that later in the movie he will fall for her. He does so just when Jefty, who has gone off hunting for something other than cabaret artistes (moose, I think), has decided to marry her. He does not take the news of his two subordinates deciding to mate well. There is a frame-up and an extraordinary judicial decision and a chase and Lily eventually shows Jefty has underestimated her toughness. Celeste Holm is also on hand as Susie, the cashier at Jefty's Joint. Widmark starts shy and ends psychotic (his specialty early in his career), Conte and Holm attempt to stay calm, and Lupino smolders (and never uses an ashtray...) Excellent chiaroscuro photography by master noir-cinematographer Joseph LaShelle (Laura, Fallen Angel, etc.).
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The very faithful adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's relatively autobiograpichal novel Sons and Lovers (directed by Jack Cardiff, 1960, 4.5 stars) has great performances by Trevor Howard as a gruff miner, Walter Morel, Wendy Hiller as his wife, Gertrud, and Dean Stockwell as Paul Morel, a sensitive Mama's boy smothered by his mother, resenting his father, and unable to get out or attain love with either the devoted Miriam (Heather Sears) or the experienced Mrs. Dawes (Mary Ure) who is a suffragette separated from her husband but connected to him in the same mystifying (carnal) way Paul's parents are.
The splendid cinematography (with particularly notable shots of Paul and Mrs. Dawes cavorting on a wintry seashore) of Freddie Francis (Room at the Top, Glory) won an Oscar. (Howard, Ure, Cardiff, the screenwriters, art decoration, and the movie were all nominated, and Cardiff won a Golden Globe and a New York film Critics award for his direction; Hiller was passed over for American award consideration, though nominated for a BAFTA).
Cardiff who had lenses some of the great Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger movies (winning an Oscar for "Black Narcissus"), went on to direct one of the worst movies ever made (Girl on a Motorcycle) and then returned to where his talent lay, and at age 80 is still amassing credits as a cinematographer. The movie should be released in a wide-screen edition on DVD (and Stockwell is still around to talk about the making of the movie).
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As the laconic, half-Apache, half-white but culturally Apache title character of Hombre (1965, based on a story by Elmore Leonard, 3.75 stars) Martin Ritt cast the very blue-eyed Paul Newman (again). Whenever I hear e. e. cummings's line "How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?" I think of Newman, though cummings was referring to someone else (Buffalo Bill) whom Newman played in another film than this. Richard Boone and Frederic March as the stereotypical villains get to ham it up more than the existential antihero halfbreed who takes on a rescue he knows is absurd and likely to be fatal. Boone got the best lines, Barbara Rush the least developed character. "Hombre" was not the most creative work of master cinematographer James Wong Howe, but I have some nostalgic affection for the movie from my teenage first viewing of it.
The disappointingly dull adaptation of Albert Camus's' The Plague (adapted and directed by Luis Puenzo (1992,1.5 stars) has striking visuals. William Hurt provided (another) charisma void, but is only partially responsible for the dullness of the movie.
The Thing Called Love(1993, 1.5 stars) has a ghoulish interest, showing River Phoenix running on empty just before he overdosed. He and once-successful director Peter Bogdanovich both had promising futures behind them in 1993, Phoenix no future at all.
The remake of a 1954 minor romantic comedy by Billy Wilder, Sabrina (directed by Sydney Pollack, 1995, 2 stars) is a sodden and oddly solemn bore that makes one feel sorry for Calista Flockhart. Julia Ormond, Greg Kinnear, and Harrison Ford take on the roles originated by Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, and Humphrey Bogart. Each of the later models was inferior to the original, though Nancy Marchand and Richard Crenna provided some relief from the robotic Ford (who seemed to think he was remaking "Presumed Innocent"). (I watched it on cable in Mexico for the Spanish subtitles.)
Nearly everything (except the irritation of the phone ringing) in Oleanna (written and directed by David Mamet, 1994, 1.3 stars) struck me as false. The movie is the epitome of "stagy" in the sense of artificiality of situation, characters, and dialogue as well as in being confined almost entirely to one set and with two performers. (Altman's adaptation of Secret Honor shows that it is possible to take a single performer in a single set and still be cinematic, but Mamet does not have Altman's cinematic imagination—or experience directing movies (now, let alone in 1994).) Both Debra Eisenstadt and William H. Macy were very good at being annoying (as the parts Mamet wrote required).
A Walk in the Clouds (1995, 2 stars), directed by Alfonso Arau with the same heavily filtered visuals and stereotypical characters as "Like Water for Chocolate." has a preposterous 1940s plot, stereotyped pan-Mediterranean characters, and Emmanuel Lubezki's photography is so grandiloquently, cloyingly artificial that the northern California locales might as well have been painted sets. Rather than 1940s Hollywood playing at marriage leading to real love and marriage, I learned that the screenplay is an adaptation from the 1942 Italianmovie, "A Stroll in the Clouds" (Quattro passi fra le nuvole, written by Cesare Zavattini and others).
Although it is too slow, has too many coincidences and too many unsolved mysteries, Gattaca (1997, written and directed by Andrew Niccol, subtly lensed by Slawomir Idziak, 4.2 stars) is one of the few science fiction movies I've enjoyed (or more than tolerated(. In part this is due to a minimum of gadgetry (and CGI), the focus on characters (even if the future humans are even more robotic than 2004-vintage Republicans), my delight that the futuristic building is the Marin Civic Center, and the presence of Alan Arkin, Xander Berkeley, Elias Koteas, Jude Law, and Gore Vidal in the cast. Even they are fairly subdued, and, although I like Ethan Hawke as a hopeless romantic (as in Alfonso Cuarón's "Great Expectations," the next movie in which he appeared after "Gattaca"), he doesn't seem to me to have quite the fire necessary to bring off making impossible dreams come true. It might have been better to have had Jude Law in the part. Lest I think that I only like sci-fi movies with Jude Law in them, I note that Niccol also wrote "The Truman Show." (And thanks to Jack for motivating me to get around to watching "Gattaca.")
Ronin (directed by John Frankenheimer, with a screenplay partly contributed under an alias by David Mamet, 1999, 3.6 stars) has two epic car chases through mostly narrow French streets. It also has a great pair of seasoned operatives in Robert DeNiro and Jean Reno. Although not a "buddy movie," the two have a shared code of honor and each has the ability to convey a great deal with very few words. The movie also works in the great Katarina Witt on ice, excellent cinematography by Robert Fraisse, and Natascha McElhon as an interesting operative sparring with De Niro. At the end, I'm not sure how many sides there were in play, but I know that DeNiro was a (postmodern?) samurai and what his quest was, though some epinionators gnash their teeth about the object of the samurai's quest...As in the other commentary tracks by the late John Frankenheimer, the one for "Ronin" is interesting and tends to persuade the listener that every aspect is better than it seemed in just watching the movie.
Tape (2001, directed by Richard Linklater from a play by Stephen Belber that Belber adapted, 4.5 stars) reunited Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, though she joins Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard in a Lansing, Michigan hotel room fairly late in the proceedings. Its content is in the general vicinity of that in "Oleanna" and is another demonstration that "cinematic" does not require opening up a one-set series of jousts between a limited number of characters. All three performances are outstanding, with Uma Thurman having the best role (less showy than Hawke's, but very tightly packed).
The most self-indulgent movie since Prince made "Under the Cherry Moon" has to be Rosanna Arquette's Searching for Debra Winger (2002, 1.5 stars), which she ostensibly directed. There musta been some editing, because interviews with Whoopi Goldberg and Sharon Stone are interspersed with scenes of Rosanna visiting Patricia, sitting around with kvetching actresses, and cornering Frances McDormand in a can at Cannes. It does not appear to have been difficult to find Debra Winger or to get her to explain why she stopped making movies at age 40, not least in that she had restarted in 2001 at age 46. What Winger relates is interesting, as are some of the things said by other actresses (and by the only man interviewed, Roger Ebert, who not only provided an explanation but a plan of action that Salma Hayek for one also reached). There's too much of Arquette(s), far too much scatter and no attempt to explore how some leading actresses survived turning 40. Charlotte Rampling shows up, but Arquette has no idea what to ask her (and, for that matter, Jane Fonda kept making movies until the age 0f 53, so might have had something to say about remaining a female movie star during her 40s). The movie is also annoyingly coy about money... and talent differentials (between Daryll Hannah and Vanessa Redgrave, to leave the Arquettes from being the low end of the continuum of talking heads in the movie).
The Girl with a Pearl Earring (directed by Peter Webber, 2003, 3.5 stars) doesn't have much drama and has types rather than characters. There is not even an attempt to hypothesize what made Vermeer tick, but I was content to look around the world (Delft) from which Vermeer's paintings derived (and cursed Newt Gingrich again for denying me access to the assemblage of two-thirds of the extant Vermeers!). The cinematography of Eduardo Serra is excellent, particularly at reproducing the light of Vermeer's studio. (Maybe in movies about painters strong visuals can be enough?) The music was more standard-issue even than the stock characters from the best-selling novel, though I have to say that Scarlett Johansson did repression and subservience very well, and I was amused by the arrogant Cillian Murphy as the butcher boy.
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I remembered many of the characters from Ruben Santiago-Hudson's play content_431288389252 in which (in 2002) I saw him play all 21 parts in his memoir of the boardinghouse-keeper who was his surrogate mother, Miss Rachel Crosby ("Nanny"). In the 2005 HBO movie directed by George W. Wolfe, Santiago-Hudson plays only one minor part. Others small parts are played by Louis Gossett Jr., Delroy Lindo, Jeffrey Wright, Henry Simmons, Rosie Perez, Mos Def, and Jimmy Smits (as the caring but mostly absent father of the boy who is remembering the colorful characters from the Lackawanna, New York black neighborhood in which he was raised; his hot and feckless mother is played by Carmen Ejogo).
A grateful tribute to a woman who held many lives together has to be sentimental, not just about her, but about the very motley crew of struggling boarders who told the young Ruben their life stories, and the movie is indeed sentimental, even more than I remember the play being.
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