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Cinevent in Columbus and the Persistence of Memory
As I pack my bags for Cinevent in Columbus, I realize with a sinking heart that I’ve been doing this for slightly more than 40 years. With all due respect for my friend John McElwee - whose Greenbriar Picture Shows is, for my money, the best of the old movie blogs - I think I’ve been going even longer than him.
I haven’t been going constantly - there was a 10 or 12 year period after I moved to Florida when I stopped, mostly because I got interested in other things, like writing books, getting married - you know, having a life. But now, dear God, it’s probably the only remaining constant in my life from when I was a teenager.
In those days, all you had to do was climb in the car and cruise down I-71 from Cleveland and there you were. It’s different now - bigger, for one thing, with enormous dealer’s rooms, and a poster auction that goes on for days, with some jaw-dropping prices - but in most respects it still feels like a bunch of film dweebs getting together to put on a show.
The movies - even the rarest ones - are in 16mm, and heads occasionally get in the way of the projector beam. Definitely low tech, and all the better for it.
In the beginning, I loved Cinevent because it was a place to see movies you couldn’t see anyplace else, and buy things you couldn’t buy anyplace else - or at least anyplace not named New York or Hollywood.
Then it became a place to get stills for my books, and see old friends.
And now it’s basically a place to see old friends, buy a few things just to keep my hand in, and enjoy the Sunday sausage buffet at Schmidt’s in German Village. And yes, I am absolutely serious, as is the sausage buffet - I believe I’ve just about finished digesting last year’s order of Bahama Mama.
When I started going, the founding generation of Midwest film aficionadoes were still alive - guys like Jerry Clark, Don Poston and Harold Kinkade. I realize with a sinking heart that I am now the age they were when I met them.
It’s an older crowd now; there are very few twenty-somethings watching movies in preparation to be film scholars, but those people are probably sitting in their living rooms doing it via downloads. To each their own.
I’m looking forward to it, but then I always do. And when it’s over, I’ll be glad I went, but then I always am.
And John - that print of “The Human Comedy” I sold you 20 years ago? If you still have it, I’ll buy it back.
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“Souls for Sale” and the Two Kinds of Movies About Movies
“Souls for Sale” starts out as one kind of movie and shape-shifts to another kind.
At first, it seems we’re in for one of those fond moviemakers-are-just-like-you-and-me-only richer movies that Hollywood tosses up from time to time: David O. Selznick’s “A Star is Born,” “Notting Hill,” etc. But as the movie goes along, it gets darker and darker, until, at the end, a circus tent is burning down, people’s lives are endangered in a very convincing manner, and the heavy gets killed by an airplane propeller. (Take that, Indiana Jones!)
Movies about movies essentially come in two varieties - those that take them seriously, and those that treat filmmakers as delusive inmates of the asylum. “Sunset Boulevard,” the greatest of all Hollywood movies, straddles both camps.
“Souls for Sale” does too, and it’s fascinating to realize that the matrix was already set as early as 1922.
The story begins simply enough; Eleanor Boardman escapes from her honeymoon by jumping off a train. Soon after hitting the sand, she encounters a film crew shooting an Arabian nights movie. She goes to Hollywood and becomes a star.
At this point, the film is primarily good, relaxed fun, and there are some fascinating glimpses of the old Goldwyn lot, which was soon to become MGM, and of various celebrities: von Stroheim directing “Greed,” Chaplin evidently caught during “A Woman of Paris.”
But as Boardman is pursued by two men - her husband, a quasi-psychopath played by the usually charming Lew Cody, and an actor who won’t take no for an answer - the usually uncharming Frank Mayo -the movie shifts gears.
It was written and directed by Rupert Hughes, the uncle of Howard Hughes, a once-popular novelist since covered up by the sands of time, but it’s not at all a bad job, and makes you wonder what his other movies look like.
“Souls for Sale” is a minor gem, deserving of a much higher profile. It’s run on Turner Classic Movies, and it’s available from Warnerarchive.com.
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Slackers in the House: Kate Hudson, McConaughey, Buffet
There’s not a lot to say about “Bride Wars,” which I watched over the weekend. I used to think I’d watch anything with Anne Hathaway, but I’m now reconsidering.
“Bride Wars” did get me thinking about a certain type of performing slacker. You know the type: Kate Hudson - here billed, for some incomprehensible reason, over Hathaway - Matthew McConaughey, Ryan Reynolds.
These are people who never actually try to build up any muscle, never work with good directors, are perfectly content to coast on charm and cute and just keep moving from inconsequential picture to inconsequential picture and always seem to get away with it. They’re reverse emblems - not of quality, or a striving for quality, but of crap.
It’s not that this proud crew of lazy is bad at what they do, it’s that what they do is so… limited and, worse, so predictable. Kate Hudson mugs and screws up her face and has one raving breakdown per picture, and it never seems to consign her to her natural habitat: a sitcom on CBS.
I don’t get it. But then I don’t get Jimmy Buffet either, who’s been selling one flabby, affectless slacker pose for close to 40 years and has been making a great deal of money for singing the same six songs over and over and over again.
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Discovering Beatrice Lillie
I was in the mood for a silent movie last night - a mood that probably strikes more than is entirely healthy - so I popped in “Exit Smiling,” a lovely little MGM picture from 1926 that Warnerarchive.com has put out. It’s one of the exceedingly rare screen appearances of Beatrice Lillie, who completely justifies her reputation in this comedy about a third rate theatrical troupe.
How crummy are they? The leading lady is a drunk, and the leading man is Franklin Pangborn, every bit as swishy at the beginning of his career as he was later on. There’s lots of endearing behavioral detail, well-directed by Sam Taylor, but it’s Lillie’s performance that drives the movie.
She was only two years past a New York debut that earned her lasting fame, and what struck me on seeing the picture was how very Chaplinesque her performance is - the fact that she has a long and very funny comedy sequence opposite Harry Myers, later the drunk millionaire of Chaplin’s “City Lights,” didn’t hurt.
Her movements are graceful and rhythmic, even when she’s breaking things, she does a couple of those quizzical moues that Chaplin used to do, and the keynote of the performance is her character’s refusal to be humiliated or downcast. This indefatigibility is funnier in a woman than it is in a man, especially when it’s done by a woman who’s not classically attractive. Lillie’s soigne manner makes her a Norma Shearer with a sense of humor, rather than the more clownish Carol Burnett.
Despite the title, the film ends on a down note, as Lillie’s character is dumped by the man she loves. It’s the only strange, sour note in a movie that is otherwise 77 minutes of pure pleasure.
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Remembering Jack Cardiff
The obituaries for Jack Cardiff correctly noted that he was both the kindest of men and the greatest of cameramen, specifically the greatest of Technicolor cameramen. (I only interviewed him once, for my John Ford book, but he was helpful and quite self-effacing about his rescue job on “Young Cassidy.”)
It seems to me that Cardiff was lucky in that he was alive and at the peak of his powers at the same time as Technicolor and such congenially experimental directors as Michael Powell.
But then Cardiff had a way of making every director congenial. I was watching “Legend of the Lost” in high-def a few weeks ago, and marveled at how luxuriously photographed that indifferently written, acted and directed film was. Henry Hathaway had moved past his arty “Peter Ibbetson” phase a long time before, but he obviously gave Cardiff as much of a long leash as he wanted, complete with Cardiff’s trademark habit of using gels in interiors, a style that was rapidly becoming outmoded by the late 1950s.
In truth, Cardiff’s art was as impressionistic as any French painter of the late 19th century, and not compatible with the general drift of the industry in the ’60s and ’70s. Oddly, his own best pictures as a director tended to be neo-realist (“Sons and Lovers”).
After an indifferent career as a director, Cardiff returned to his first love, but his later photography is flat and one-dimensional by comparison to his work in the ’40s and ’50s. But he was one of those people who just loved working, and the cameraderie of a film shoot greatly appealed to him.
We got him at his best. He was, I think, a true artist in a medium that only occasionally supports such a rarified talent.
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“A Song is Born” tediously remakes “Ball of Fire”
I can only assume that in 1948 Howard Hawks was drowning under some particularly dire gambling debts.
Nothing else would explain why he would have signed on to direct a remake of a movie he had directed perfectly well only six or seven years earlier. The original movie, of course, was “Ball of Fire,” a more or less delightful picture starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. The remake, “A Song is Born,” stars Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo and the decline into the conventional is not just embodied by the actors.
“A Song is Born” has just come out on DVD from MGM. I hadn’t seen it in 25 years, so racked it up with some interest, but that didn’t last long. Goldwyn’s sole good idea was to stuff the movie full of jazz artists - in place of the lexicography gimmick of the original, the New York brownstone is full of musicologists. That explains why Benny Goodman gets third billing.
I did get a kick out of seeing Mel Powell, and I can only guess that someone on the Goldwyn lot had a fair amount of musical sophistication, because besides Louis Armstrong - the go-to man any time a movie needed a shot of energetic jazz - the movie also tosses in Charlie Barnet and Lionel Hampton, not to mention Tommy Dorsey - not a jazz artist, but let’s not let our minds by hobbled by irrelevant consistency.
The upshot of all this is that the music is good, but the movie around the music just lays there. The color is pretty, in that late ’40s Technicolor way - Goldwyn’s use of Technicolor was a lot like Fox’s, that is to say, pretty garish - but it’s not distinguished in any way, and with Gregg Toland’s name on it you expect it to be. But then Toland’s best, most innovative work was never for Goldwyn, even though he spent most of his career under contract there. His best work was on loan-out - to Fox and John Ford for “The Grapes of Wrath,” to RKO and Orson Welles for “Citizen Kane.”
The strangest thing about the movie is that it’s one of the few films I can think of without a screenplay credit; the only writers mentioned are Billy Wilder and Thomas Monroe, for their original story. Very curious. Another movie without a screenplay credit is “Friendly Persuasion,” but that’s because it was written by a blacklisted Michael Wilson. What ones am I forgetting?
And is it just me or does this terrible movie provides a fairly comprehensive argument against the auteur theory, or at least the auteur theory without the compensations of a strong cast and script?
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Peter Bogdanovich on “Nickelodeon.”
It’s always good to catch up with Peter Bogdanovich, and the new DVD release of “Nickelodeon” was no exception. At the time the film was released, the slapstick tone of the film’s first half struck me as forced, but I liked the melancholy later portions a lot.
Now that the film is in black and white, the freneticism seems toned down, along with the color.
“It’s a compromised picture,” Bogdanovich told me. “I wanted to make it in black and white, which makes it more of an old movie, and also makes it more realistic. But the studio - David Begelman was running Columbia - was adamant. And I wanted Cybill Shepherd as the girl, but they were adamant about that too. Jane Hitchcock is fine, but Cybill has a more threatening quality that Jane didn’t have. And I wanted Jeff Bridges and John Ritter for the two leads, but the studio wanted movie stars, and I wanted Orson Welles for the Brian Keith part, but the studio didn’t want to pay him. Overall, it wasn’t a pleasant experience.”
Would Welles have had the energy that Keith brings to the part?
“I don’t know, but that’s a good question.
“It began when my agent called me and told me [producers] Chartoff and Winkler were working on a picture about the silent days, and was I interested in directing it? If I wasn’t interested, they were going to ask Arthur Penn. The writer was W.D. Richter and I read his script, but it wasn’t what I was interested in doing, so Richter and I began working on an entirely new script.
“I brought the screwball comedy into the script, but I don’t know that I had an overall plan. It was an era that was out of control, there was a wildness to it, and I wanted to capture some of that excess and humor.
“I put in a lot of stories that Leo McCarey - who had been a lawyer, like Ryan O’Neal’s character - told me, and some stories from Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh as well.”
I told Bogdanovich that the ending reminds of the ending of “The Bad and the Beautiful,” but he says that it actually derived from something Fritz Lang once told him. “He told me he was in a car once, complaining about a producer, how hard it was to make pictures, when the car passed a greenhouse where they were shooting a picture and he instantly stopped complaining. ‘And you curse yourself for loving it so,’ he said.”
“I don’t think it’s a perfect picture; I don’t think it’s one of my best, but I like it better now than I did at the time. I’m just glad it’s out in the best presentation for the material.”
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“The Red Lily” from warnerarchive.com
“The Red Lily” is one of the more obscure titles being offered by warnerarchive.com, but it’s also one of the most surprising.
Surprising because it’s a resolute ride down the path of social and personal degradation up until a last minute happy ending; surprising because it feels like some undiscovered novel by Victor Hugo; surprising because it was written and directed by Fred Niblo, whom no one has ever mistaken for a graceful talent; surprising because of its stunning art direction by Ben Carre.
The story has touches of Chaplin’s “A Woman of Paris,” but mostly it’s a predecessor of the Janet Gaynor/Charles Farrell starcrossed lovers movies that Frank Borzage would direct at Fox in a few years time. (“The Red Lily” was made in 1924.)
The place is Paris, the time is the late 19th century. The two characters start out as innocent young lovers, they get separated, she becomes a whore, he becomes a thief. Years later, they reunite and recapture their youthful freshness. (Had Niblo seen “The Enchanted Cottage”?)
The stars are Ramon Novarro and Enid Bennett, Niblo’s wife at the time, and they’re both quite good, but what particularly struck me was the art direction. Ben Carre contributes a succession of sets that don’t particularly look like anything other than beautiful sets - the walls are heavily distressed, but the floors are usually too clean - but cumulatively they create an alternate reality. A rough comparison would be the sets for “Children of Paradise” - you’re always conscious they’re sets, but they provide a perfect proscenium for the larger than life characters.
Fred Niblo was never a stylist, but he could occasionally create an effective mood, and he does that here, and the story is so downbeat you’re grateful for the happy ending.
The print that Turner has used for their video master is quite beautiful, obviously 35mm material, and well-tinted, with an effective musical score by Scott Salinas.
I missed “The Red Lily” when TCM ran it a few years ago, but I’ll be looking at the DVD again in the future. It’s a keeper, a good example of a silent film that doesn’t have a reputation but deserves one.
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Telling the world about “Tell No One.”
It’s true that “Tell No One,” has a dandy set-up: a doctor’s wife was murdered eight years before. Her body was identified by her father, autopsied, and the husband cleared of the crime for which no one was ever prosecuted. It’s eight years later and he’s laboriously put the pieces of his life back together, when he gets an email with an attachment.
When he opens it, the video clip shows his wife, in some public space, staring at the surveillance camera.
And we’re off.
Although “Tell No One” is a French movie, it doesn’t particularly feel French, partially because the star looks exactly like Dustin Hoffman’s younger brother, partially because it’s based on a novel by the American Harlan Coben where things keep happening.
Unfortunately, as is often the case when a truly original mystery premise is on offer, when the final explanation comes, it’s completely preposterous - far too complicated and dependent on coincidence, never could never have happened in a million years.
And the filmmakers missed an opportunity - the lead’s profession as doctor never comes into play, while his apparent skills as a marathon runner are.
But if you’re not a stickler for verisimilitude in your thrillers, “Tell No One” is worth two hours of your time. It has a great foot chase across a busy freeway, it has a couple of truly nasty villains, and it even has a dash of two of hard core violence. (It also has an unusually funky blues-rock soundtrack that shouldn’t work but does.)
I’m not entirely sure that we need French movies that try to be American movies, but “Tell No One” is at least trying to be a good American movie, and for that I’m grateful.
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Remembering Richard de Mille
Richard deMille liked to hide behind the facade of a slightly chilly academic, but it was a pose. Despite our very different generations and politics, I always found him the most endearing of men, always impeccably turned out in a jacket, often quite funny, with a raptor’s eye for the surface silliness of the Hollywood society he was born into but always felt slightly distant from.
Richard was the illegitimate son of William de Mille - the father of Agnes de Mille, the brother of Cecil B. de Mille. William was a very fine director in his own right, and had a fling with one of his writers, a woman named Lorna Moon. About nine months after Richard’s birth, Cecil took the foundling in (and what I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall during that conversation between Cecil and his wife.) The public cover story was that Cecil and Constance, who had already adopted two orphans to go with their natural child Cecilia, had adopted yet another.
The two brothers made a pact. William was to have nothing to do with the boy beyond conventional conversations at family gatherings. Whichever one of them died first, the survivor was to tell Richard the truth about his parentage.
When William died in 1955, Cecil came to Richard, told him that his father was his Uncle William, and that his mother was an author. As proof, he handed William a book.
“To William de Mille, tenderly. Lorna Moon.”
It’s a story out of Dickens, really, complete with a happy ending, and one Richard told superlatively well in his book “My Secret Mother.” Talking to Richard about his book some ten years ago led us to a friendship that resulted in my undertaking the authorized biography of Cecil B. DeMille, a book that will be completed in a few months.
Richard died last week at the age of 84. The harsh fact that he will not be able to read the pages that resulted from the trust he and his niece placed in me - to tell the story of his adopted father with honesty and, perhaps, understanding - will be a continuing sadness in my life.
I miss Richard’s voice, the way he had of slightly stuttering at the beginning of a sentence, then recovering and proceeding without any further hurdles.
I miss his belief in me.
Most of all, I miss him.
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Flicker Alley’s “The Yankee Clipper”
In some ways “The Yankee Clipper” is a generic silent action movie - stalwart hero (William Boyd), very bad bad guy (Walter Long) and a beautiful leading lady without a lot to do (Elinor Fair.)
But don’t condescend - this action movie is beautifully (and expensively) shot. Cecil B. DeMille, who produced the picture, bought and retrofitted two mid-19th century ships to more convincingly replicate a race between one British ship and one American ship to decide the national representative for the Chinese tea trade.
It also features a great storm at sea sequence with excellent special effects - a combination of miniatures and full-sized sets. “The Yankee Clipper,” has previously been around in various cut versions, but this new print - actually a combination of at least two pre-prints - puts the whole film together in a very pleasing package.
“The Yankee Clipper” is the centerpiece of a new collection from Flicker Alley entitled “Under Full Sail.” Also included are a collection of actuality sailing films from the changeover to sound, as well as a ten-minute whaling sequence from Elmer Clifton’s “Down to the Sea in Ships,” which is by all odds the best thing in that surprisingly dull picture.
In some ways, “The Yankee Clipper” is more typical of DeMille than it is of its actual director, Rupert Julian, whose primary credit is the Lon Chaney “Phantom of the Opera” even though it seems practically everybody at Universal had a hand in putting the final version of that evergreen gothic together. “The Yankee Clipper” has a story that can be understood by anyone over the age of six, broad lines of action and romance in an physically expansive and believable environment.
It’s never art, but it is extremely enjoyable. Like all of Flicker Alley’s releases, the presentation and print quality are very high.
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A restoration of “The Alamo” …paid for by you and me?
The news that the archivist Robert Harris, whose restorations have ranged from the superb (“Lawrence of Arabia”) to the dubious (“Vertigo”) is soliciting public funds to restore John Wayne’s “The Alamo” is, as Arte Johnson would say, “verrrrrry interesting.”
Now, I don’t have any quarrel with Harris’ taste; “The Alamo” doesn’t have a good script, but when the Mexicans finally start coming over the walls, Wayne pulls together a great action sequence, as good in its way as the chariot race in “Ben-Hur,” and the chariot race is the only thing anybody ever remembers about “Ben-Hur” - or needs to.
Beneath the inflammatory rhetoric about it’s-now-or-never, the film-is-deteriorating-as-we-speak, what this really means is that MGM, who owns the film - John Wayne sold it off in the late ’60s, I believe - doesn’t think they could sell enough DVD’s to justify the expense of the restoration. They’ll ante up some, but not nearly enough.
Follow the money a little further: MGM will reap the rewards, of course, but all the contributors get for their money is a tax deduction.
Well.
Either the DVD market is much, much worse than we’ve been led to believe - a 10-15% decline is the figure usually quoted - or the appeal of John Wayne, the primary male movie star for several generations - has fallen a lot more than I think it has. (Paramount anted up serious dollars a few years ago for the film library of Batjac, Wayne’s production company.)
By way of comparison, I don’t see Fox asking the public to pay to restore “The Robe,” and “The Alamo” is a lot more commercial than “The Robe.”
Besides an amazing corporate hustle, what’s going on here?
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The Future of Julia Roberts
I didn’t have much to think about during “Duplicity,” a caper movie by people who deluded themselves into thinking they were too high-toned to make a caper movie, so I started thinking about what Julia Roberts should do about her career.
Yeah, I know: presumptuous as hell.
But the truth is that she’s no longer the cute babe, and nobody ever mistook her for the second coming of Meryl Streep, and people aren’t going to her movies.
So here’s what I think. I think Julia Roberts does the extremes really well - cold and indifferent/funny and charming. In between, she coasts and works off her charm.
We’ve all seen her do funny and charming ad nauseum, so I think it’s time she went for a wild card - something that nobody can see coming. Something like Regina in “The Little Foxes.” I’d love to see her play the scene where her husband seizes up and dies without her making a move to save him. I bet she’d hit it out of the park. I also would love to see her manipulating and dominating her entire subservient family.
She’d also look good in those 19th century costumes.
It’s a Queen Bee part, it would give her some street cred, and if she had to take a pay cut to get the movie made, or even had to do it for HBO, well, Jane Fonda did “A Doll’s House” for ABC at about the identical stage of her career, and it didn’t hurt her any.
I realize that Fonda was far more ambitious at nearly every stage of her career than Roberts, but this is no time to be cautious. The early 40s are when an actress either slinks away to glorified guest shots - Michelle Pfeiffer - or hits the gas: Susan Sarandon, the aforementioned Ms. Streep.
Just some free advice, undoubtedly worth what it costs.
But Roberts needs to do something.
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Remembering Maurice Jarre
Here’s why I love my job(s).
About five years ago, I was on the phone with Maurice Jarre. We were talking about his career and the subject of David Lean came up, as it was bound to. He talked about writing the score for “Lawrence of Arabia,” working for Sam Spiegel, and its corrolary, getting shafted by Sam Spiegel.
And when the topic turned to “Doctor Zhivago,” he moved over to his piano - he was in Paris at the time - put the phone on top of the piano, and played through the variations he went through until he came up with the final version of “Lara’s Theme.”
Being of a crusty nature, I don’t impress all that easily, and I’m not even all that crazy about “Doctor Zhivago,” but I have to tell you, a chill went down my back. One of the major film composers of his time was giving me a tutorial in music composition.
Jarre never quite got his critical due because of his timing. He was one of a group of composers who took over from the venerated Steiner/Herrmann/Newman generation, so he was classified as being lightweight or pop for far too long.
But he wrote a lot of good music for a lot of good movies, some of which he made better than the movies would have been otherwise. Among the stuff that doesn’t get a lot of attention, I would single out his music for Richard Brooks’ “The Professionals,” (one of my favorite westerns, although it always seems to be lurking beneath the radar) and Huston’s “The Man Who Would be King,” among many others.
I can’t claim any emotional intimacy wih Maurice Jarre on the basis of a one hour phone conversation, but I can tell you that he purely loved his job, and was an excellent communicator about the delicate dance between directors - who often have no musical vocabulary - and composers - who often have little else.
And one other thing: he was a gentleman.
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Steven Bach RIP
I met Steven Bach five years ago, during a seminar in Salzburg. We knew each other because we’d talked on the phone a few times, about one of his books, or one of mine.
He was particularly helpful and insightful about Josef von Sternberg, who had been a teacher of his in college, and about whom I have thought about writing a book for years, without ever being able to pull the trigger.
(It’s something about von Sternberg’s personality, which was completely negative, and which I think would make it nearly impossible to empathize with him. Empathy is as important for a writer as it is an actor. You don’t have to like your character, but you do have to find something in him you can latch onto, some commonality through which you can see the world as he saw it…).
Steven was tall, slender, energetic, smart, and a delightful companion. He had been United Artist’s point man in the “Heaven’s Gate” fiasco, about which he wrote the indelible book “FInal Cut.”
Most movie people aren’t terribly adept at putting together second or third acts outside of show business, because they’re not well-suited for anything else. Steven was different. He was genial and collegial, and totally unlike the Sammy Glick stereotype of the Hollywood hustler, which is probably why he hadn’t been terribly successful there.
He seemed to love teaching at Bennington, and writing his books, although his volume on Leni Riefenstahl had utterly exhausted him - not the book itself, but dealing with a personality of such pathological narcissism.
The news of Steven’s death two days ago surprised me but didn’t shock me; the last time I saw him was at a dinner party a year ago, and he seemed tired and drawn, although I ascribed it to the residual exhaustion from the Riefenstahl project, the book tour, etc.
I’m glad for Steven that he found happiness in his second career, and I’m very glad I got to know him; I just wish he’d lived longer and written more books, but the books he did write were all excellent and will last as part of the literature of the movies.
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Balanchine and “Concerto Barocco.”
The Miami City Ballet’s closing night of their season at the Kravis Center here in West Palm Beach presented three works, two by Balanchine, one by Jerome Robbins. It’s possible that “Concerto Barocco” just knocked my socks off, so I couldn’t see the other two pieces at all, but the Robbins - a wispy ballet to wispy Chopin music - bored me, and Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” I admired but from a distance.
“Concerto Barocco,” is danced to a piece by Bach, but you’d never know it. It plays as if Bach not only wrote the music but choreographed the dance. Most dances, even great ones, are applied over the music like a coat of paint. The colors might be beguiling, but you can always tell there’s a push-pull going on, because few choreographers are selfless enough to give themselves over to a composer, mostly because they know that the eye usually takes precedence over the ear.
But “Concerto Barocco” is seamless, Balanchine entering into what can only be called a communion, a conversation, with another great artist. It’s the ballet as call-and-response. As with Bach, the dance has that light, airy, slightly playful feel that only the greatest artists can summon, no matter how serious their themes.
It’s a dazzling piece, and I was, appropriately enough, dazzled.
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The First Batch of Titles from Warnerarchives.com
The news that Warner Bros. had established a DVD-and-download-on-demand service (warnerarchive.com) has certainly stirred the pot.
Finally, films that simply can’t move enough units to justify the considerable overhead of a major company’s distribution center will be reaching the public.
I’ve got a dozen or so out of the first 150 available titles, and they’re solid in both packaging and quality. The Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott “Westbound” is probably the least of their collaborations, and the DVD looks a little soft, but I’ve looked at two other titles (“The Red Lily,” and “Souls for Sale,”) and they’re razor-sharp. The transfers are the same ones that Turner Classic Movies has been using, and that means they’re very good, at the very least.
Warners has, next to Universal, the most varied and interesting film library, so the fact that they’re opening it up to the extent they are (downloads are $14.95, DVD’s are $19.95, and about 20 titles will be added every month) is a real boon. For years I’ve been making jokes about the John Gilbert boxed set that keeps receding away from me like Fitzgerald’s light on the dock, but now it seems like it just might become a reality. They can start with “The Big Parade,” finish with “Downstairs” and I’ll never bitch again about hidebound DVD releases ( “To Catch A Thief” for the fourth time in ten years?).
All by itself, warnerarchive.com loosens the ice that has been slowly forming around DVD as the economy has tightened. If just one other studio follows suit, the dynamite will explode and the logs will really start moving downriver.
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“The Great Buck Howard” as a summer breeze
“The Great Buck Howard” isn’t going to change anybody’s life, but I enjoyed it because of that, not in spite of it. It’s a character study - somewhere between “Broadway Danny Rose” and “Death of a Salesman” - of a mentalist who trundles around third rate venues such as Bakersfield and Cincinnati doing schtick that was tired 30 years ago.
The star is John Malkovich, his road manager is Colin Hanks, and the dynamic is not unlike “The Dresser.” Although the inferior knows he’s watching his superior’s slow-motion train-wreck, he’s perversely fascinated by his own proximity. Unlike “The Dresser,” the tone is affectionate, even loving.
Besides that, there is Emily Blunt.
Let me repeat that: Emily Blunt.
The part isn’t much, but this wonderful comedienne just glows, and some of her sex appeal rubs off on Colin Hanks, who is…OK, I guess. Not exciting, but OK.
“The Great Buck Howard” functioned for me as an escape from the tone of so many current movies - slob comedies or apocalyptic fanboy fantasies of empowerment. It’s probably too small-scaled and intentionally modest to be a hit, but you could do worse, and undoubtedly have.
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Murnau’s “Faust” and the Necessity of Transformation
Watching Kino’s new two-disc set of Murnau’s “Faust” the other night, I was struck by how frequently he dealt with transformation - spiritual as well as physical.
In “Faust,” there is the initial transformation of the fallen angel to Mephisto, and the final ascension of the - frankly boring - young lovers. In “Nosferatu,” the vampire dissolves when struck by daylight; in “Sunrise” George O’Brien’s transformation occurs in the beautiful church scene, when he realizes how much he loves the wife he intended to kill.
Then there’s “City Girl,” as the hardened, not terribly attractive waitress is forced by circumstance to function as her young husband’s backbone because of his fear of his patriarchal father. As she refuses to capitulate, she becomes more beautiful.
In his final film, “Tabu” the transformation is downward, as the carefree lovers we see in the beginning are pursued and destroyed by a malevolent fate.
The more you look at Murnau, the deeper he gets, and the wonder of it is that his early films really aren’t very good. For me, he doesn’t start to kick in till “Nosferatu.” After that, he was always zig-zagging in terms of story material, which led him astray at least once. (I think the only misfire of his mature period is “Tartuffe,” but I have to withold a final judgment until I see the new restoration.)
But Murnau’s determination to plumb the depths and his great technical inventiveness gives his work a visual and thematic density that repays constant vigilance - even if he couldn’t do much with William Dieterle and Camilla Horn.
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1939 - The Greatest Year in Movie History?
I was in New York over the weekend working on a documentary that will be included on the Blu-ray edition of “Gone With the Wind,” out later this year. And no, I haven’t seen any footage from the new transfer, although I am curious - three-strip Technicolor was an innately soft process, so the new transfer might not be as radical an upgrade as we might think.
The doc concerns itself with the year 1939, generally regarded as the best year in movie history, although I’ve always had a certain stealth affection for 1941.
Still, 1939 did offer a great deal: “Gone With the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Stagecoach,” “Young Mr. Lincoln, “Gunga Din,” “Ninotchka,” “Union Pacific,” “Wuthering Heights,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Only Angels Have Wings”…I could go on.
A lot - most - of the documentaries included on DVD’s are throwaways, PR pap, but some are quite good, and I’ve noticed with a sinking feeling that writers are increasingly using these DVD documentaries as background material for books, which should enforce ever-higher standards on the people making them. There’s enough bad history and disinformation floating around without adding to the pile.
A general rule of thumb is the more serious the movie, the more demanding the audience, the better the documentary.
This one will, I think, be among the latter. Constantine Nasr, the producer, is young and serious and has done excellent work before - his documentary on gangster films ran on Turner Classic Movies before it was included as a DVD extra, and the 1939 piece is scheduled for TCM as well.
I’ll let you know more as we get closer to release.
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Spencer Tracy and “Man’s Castle”
People seem to think that all movies are out there somewhere, especially all sound movies.
They’re not.
Turner Classic Movies recently ran Frank Borzage’s “Man’s Castle,” a key Depression movie - I’ve been thinking a lot about the Depression lately, but then who isn’t? - starring Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young. It’s a lovely little movie, sort of a sound version of Borzage’s Charles Farrell/Janet Gaynor pictures, updated to include desperate economic times and Hooverville’s - which combine to make it look very up-to-date.
But the transfer that Turner got from Columbia was far from pristine - dupey-looking, with splices and some abrupt transitions. This was a major film from a major director, with major stars, from a major studio, and what’s left after 75 years is in pretty ragged shape.
As for the film itself, it was slightly dimmed by its physical presentation. I saw a very good 16mm print years ago and it had a great impact on me. So much of the spiritual aspect of Borzage’s films is communicated visually. If that’s degraded, you’re missing an awful lot.
What’s left of “Man’s Castle” is mainly a great showcase for the young Spencer Tracy playing a rough, and slightly sexy, proletarian part, before MGM gradually converted him into a paragon of middle-American decency, and before Tracy’s own difficult private life threw him into what was clearly a premature middle - and old - age.
Even in its present state, “Man’s Castle” is worth a look.
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Further information on Mary Duncan aka Mary Sanford
A few months ago I wrote a piece about Mary Duncan, who gave such astonishing performances in F.W. Murnau’s “City Girl” and Frank Borzage’s “The River.”
After she retired to Palm Beach in the early 1930s, she was known as Mary Sanford, and her movie career rapidly receded into the background.
There are very few people left from the era when Sanford, along with Marjorie Merriweather Post, ruled Palm Beach society, but I recently talked to another hardy survivor, Celia Lipton Farris. Farris came to Palm Beach in the late 50s, at a point when Sanford had already been here for 25 years.
I thought that since Farris had been in show business as well, the subject of their respective acting careers might have come up.
No such luck.
“We never talked about it,” Farris told me. “She never mentioned it. Her career wasn’t theater, or theater people. Mary didn’t care about her career. I really don’t think she cared. She liked to go on safari and go shooting. She was fun, a great personality.”
Curiouser and curiouser.
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Sydney Chaplin RIP
I spent decades collecting string on Charlie Chaplin, with the vague idea of one day writing a book, until I realized that I didn’t really have anything interesting to say on the subject - not that that has stopped a lot of people from writing books on the same subject.
Syd Chaplin, who died last week at 82, was Chaplin’s son and a thoroughly delightful man - unpretentious, charming, quite funny. (Robert Wagner, who did time with Syd at a boarding school both men assured me was unspeakable, says to this day that Syd was one of the funniest men he’s ever known.)
Syd was also a good actor and very handsome, but he didn’t have the career his talents entitled him to. His dad gave him a great start with “Limelight,” and Syd had a couple of big Broadway hits, including “Bells Are Ringing” and “Funny Girl.”
But once you got to know him, it made perfect sense. Charlie Chaplin was a true obsessive/compulsive - once he got his teeth into a film, he lived and breathed it 24 hours a day until the picture was finished, for years at a time.
Syd gave the definite impression that at these times he found his dad to be exhausting. Syd had other interests, and he can fairly be said to have enjoyed his life, especially when it came to women and golf.
Charlie liked his son, and when it came to women, the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree, but he didn’t understand his lack of drive. Actually, it makes a certain rough sense, for Syd was named after Charlie’s brother, also quite talented, also a man who could be said to have opted for the more relaxed pleasures of life at the cost of a distinguished career.
I used to side with Charlie about these things, but the older I get, the more I think that Syd Chaplin - uncle and nephew - might have had the right idea. Unfortunately, these kinds of things derive from nature, not nurture.
In any case, as anybody who knew him could attest, Syd was always a gentleman, and I’m glad I knew him, however tangentially.
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Horton Foote RIP
Here’s what made Horton Foote a good writer: he wrote about people in conflict with themselves. What’s more, the people knew it, which was the source of their anguish and the conflict within Foote’s work. No heroes, no villains, just people wrestling with the angels and demons of their nature.
No script has ever channeled the soul of a novel more successfully than Foote’s for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” His original script for “Tender Mercies” was a small miracle that, equally miraculously, found the perfect actor in Robert Duvall. (He wasn’t as lucky with his script for “Of Mice and Men,” which had not one, but two miscast actors - Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.)
Foote kept the faith with his characters and he kept the faith with his first love, the stage, because he adamantly refused to write about anything other than small towns and the people that live in them. I can’t imagine that his work won’t be remembered and enjoyed long after far more fashionable writers are hived off into the obscurity that usually swallows people who don’t transcend their own period.
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Roger Corman, Vincent Price, “The Pit and the Pendulum” and the Glory of Digital
Digital media have given us something nobody ever imagined they’d see - movies that look better on our plasma screens than they did on theater screens. I’m not talking about the ghastly, over-emphatic clean-ups that take away all the grain, expose wires and wig lines and leave the poor movie as exposed as a corpse on a morgue slab.
I’m talking abou the difference that a tasteful digital cleanup can make to a movie that was well-shot but hamstrung by lousy 35mm prints; I’m talking about the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood Man With No Name trilogy, which look a lot better now than they did in the grainy, terrible quality Techniscope prints United Artists foisted on the public in the mid 60s; I’m talking about the new high-def print of Roger Corman’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” that I saw the other day on MGM-HD.
Corman shot his Poe films quickly, in two or three weeks, and the films were hampered both by the shoddy Pathe prints that American-International sent out, and by the hard fact that they mostly played in drive-ins, where the off-screen action was a lot more vivid than the on-screen illumination.
But Corman had two aces up his sleeve: art director Daniel Haller and the grievously underrated cameraman Floyd Crosby. Crosby, the father of David Crosby, started out shooting film for F.W. Murnau on “Tabu,” He knew light, he knew dark, and he knew all the shadings in between. He maximized the impact of Haller’s sets, which look great on the new transfer, and he also got a near-Technicolor saturation of color.
When Haller didn’t have enough money, he’d habitually do something off-the-wall and sometimes it worked out. Check out the genuinely weird and kinky chalk drawings of coweled dungeon-masters on the walls of the torture pit.
The high def transfer doesn’t make the film any better than it was, because the shakiest part of Corman’s films is always the acting. Vincent Price was as camp as a row of tents, and a lot of the supporting casts were relatively free of the burden of talent.
But the new transfers do make the films look better than they ever have before, and even if you don’t like middle-period Corman, you should check out these films as they become available.
I can hardly wait for “The Masque of the Red Death” - shot by Nicolas Roeg, shortly before he began directing.
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Baseball and Depression/Recession
The economy is hammering all facets of American life, even the most sacred of them all: baseball.
I went over to Tampa last week for the first game of spring training. On the bill were the Yankees and the Rays. In some respects, it was as expected. Yogi Berra, Reggie Jackson and Ron Guidry were all there. (Where was Whitey Ford?) Bernie Williams threw out the first pitch, and the Yankees won because Jorge Posada was in mid-season form, while everybody else was flopping around trying to avoid breaking a sweat.
But the shocker was the attendance. Maybe 75% of the seats were filled, where there would have been standing room only a few years ago.
I looked at my ticket: $31.50. Figure two tickets, some food, parking, and you’re talking about a $100 afternoon, and that’s without buying anything in the souvenir shop. That’s a lot of money in a low, mean time.
Football might skate past this particular abyss because there are only 16 games in the schedule, but I’ll be very surprised if baseball attendance isn’t affected.
Movies are cheap; sports are expensive.
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New Yorker Films RIP
The news of the collapse of New Yorker Films strikes a frisson of nostalgia in anybody who remembers when New Yorker was, well, New Yorker - right up there with Janus Films, except better taste for new movies.
Their heyday was the ’60s and ’70s, when New Yorker rolled out Fassbinder and Godard and Wajda and Fellini with great regularity. But they hadn’t had a hit in a long time, and the erosion of the DVD market over the last year put paid to their attempts at bailing the water their theatrical failures brought in.
Truthfully, New Yorker hadn’t been New Yorker for a long time. The videos they issued were often mastered from sub-standard materials, and a lot of the most valuable library titles had reverted to their European copyright holders, mostly, I suspect, because the company couldn’t afford to re-up.
It’s sad, but it’s not a tragedy; with a little bit of luck (as Stanley Holloway would say) someone will pick up the titles that ought be picked up…and hopefully issue better quality DVD’s.
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Oscar! Oscar! Oscar!
The show was better than the awards, but that’s the problem with annual events; you have to hand the things out whether anybody deserves them or not.
On balance, last night’s Oscar show was entertaining, although it’ll never really take flight because they have to keep grinding to a halt to hand out 25 awards.
I thought Hugh Jackman’s opening number was a semi-charming parody of the traditional overstuffed Oscar opening number, and his big mix-tape production number with Beyonce was first-rate. (They should let Baz Luhrmann stage things, but not photograph them, because he’s a hyperkinetic horror in the editing room.)
I for one hope Jackman is right, and that musicals are back, although he’s probably too warm and too young to play Henry Higgins in the new version of “My Fair Lady” that’s being bruited about. On the other hand, if Robert Downey Jr can play Sherlock Holmes, anything’s possible. In any case, “My Fair Lady” is a singing show, not a dancing show, and Jackman’s singing isn’t as good as his dancing.
Oh, one other thing: The roster of past winners saluting each nominee instead of rote film clips - great idea!
The awards themselves were more or less as expected, although some friends of mine expressed shock at Sean Penn’s win. I explained that has more to do with the volume of bridges Mickey Rourke must have burned in the last ten years than it does Penn’s performance.
All in all…a solid B, maybe even a B+. If the producers had had some really good movies to show off, it would have rated a solid A.
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The Miami City Ballet and “Don Quixote.”
Of course, I loved the Miami City Ballet’s “Don Quixote”, on view at the Kravis Center this past weekend. It’s practically a silent movie - with a good score. And with capework! Douglas Fairbanks would have loved it.
There really is a connection to be made between the theater, opera and ballet of the 19th century and the movies of the early 20th - the art direction, the presentational performance styles, etc. It’s all gone in the movies, but it survives on stage, in revivals of the ballet and opera warhorses of the past.
Structurally, I was surprised that there wasn’t a solo for the Don or Sancho, and it seemed to me that the second and third acts could be combined, thus saving a 15 minute intermission, but beyond that I have no meaningful criticism. And who knew Alex Wong, one of the most gifted of the troupe’s ensemble of young dancers, was such a hilarious little clown?
The dancing was superb, right through to the chorus work. I told my wife afterward that “Don Quixote” was the kind of ballet that kids dream of performing when they think of being dancers - colorful costumes, sensual abandon and a predominating tone of great good humor.
It’s the perfect ballet for the Miami group, who are my biggest source of cultural discovery of the last several years.
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“The French Connection,” and mindless revisionism
I spent an agonizing half hour last night with the Blu-ray of “The French Connection,” which William Friedkin has buggered to within an inch of its life.
The short version: it no longer looks like the drably realistic slam-bang procedural/character study we know and love. It looks like a Tony Scott movie, where the story is irrelevant and the style is an irritating all.
Grain is brought up, colors fringe - it’s a visual nightmare that constantly interposes itself between you and Popeye Doyle.
This would have been bearable as the misguided conceit of an aging man if the original version was also part of the package, but it’s not. What Friedkin has done, probably in a misguided attempt to create some buzz about what is, after all, just another movie from Fox’s back catalogue, is far more intrusive than the reshot special effects of the early “Star Wars” movies, or the added effects to the DVD of “THX 1138” - the latter of which aroused barely a ripple.
People vandalizing old movies is nothing new, but people vandalizing their own old movies…for that we had to wait for CGI.
For God’s sake, keep Friedkin away from his movies. Or, rather, let him futz around all he wants with “The Brinks Job” or “Deal of the Century.”
Just leave “Sorcerer” alone.
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Alexander Korda and Douglas Fairbanks Redux
The best news I’ve heard lately involves Criterion’s release in May of an Alexander Korda box set on their budget Eclipse label.
The best film of the lot is “Rembrandt.” Korda directs it extremely well, but it’s mainly notable as one of Charles Laughton’s greatest performances. At the end, as the aged, beaten Rembrandt, he summons a kind of essence of bedraggled humanity.
Also worth the time is “The Private Life of Don Juan,” the last film of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and a pleasant surprise. The part of Don Juan is not actually a great fit for Fairbanks - on screen, he was a charmer and a swashbuckler, not a lover, but the film is really spinning more off his off-screen persona than his screen past.
For the five or so years before he made the 1934 film, Fairbanks had gotten more attention for his voyages around the world and turning Mary Pickford into, first, a golf widow and, second, a betrayed wife, than he had been getting for his movies - and properly so.
Nevertheless, Fairbanks’ charm and bravado are still intact, and he brings a note of rueful exhaustion to the part that may not have been acting.
As for “The Private Life of Henry VIII,” it’s a popular favorite, but I’ve always felt Laughton is winking at the audience rather too strenuously, the better to make a rather dangerous man into a likeable, overaged kid.
The other film in the set, “The Rise of Catherine the Great,” I’ve never seen, put off by the terrible films of director Paul Czinner that I have seen. Even if it’s lousy, three out of four is a better batting average than most box sets.
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Iraq Movies and Why “In the Valley of Elah” is Better Than the Others
Along with the rest of America, I didn’t see Paul Haggis’ “In the Valley of Elah” in the theater, but I caught up with it on TIVO over the weekend.
Afterwards, I sat there wondering what the problem was.
The reviews were heavily divided, and, like an idiot, I believed the negative ones. The movie didn’t strike me as particularly depressing, but then depressing subjects only depress me when they’re done badly. It’s particularly well-acted and well-directed, in a calm, quietly ominous way. Actually, I liked it more than Haggis’ “Crash.”
It feels to me like the widespread revulsion over the Iraq war unfairly washed over “Elah.” (A lot of the other Iraq-themed films got more or less what they deserved.) I suppose that’s understandable from the public’s point of view, but it’s the critic’s job to blow whistles, rant, rave, set off fireworks, do whatever’s necessary to draw attention to the occasional good film, whether it disturbs our peace or not.
Haggis got shafted, and the audience missed a good movie, with one of Tommy Lee Jones’ best performances, and notable work from Charlize Theron, Josh Brolin, and a passel of young actors.
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The Western Channel, “Maverick” and Changing Standards of Production
The Western Channel has picked up a bunch of TV shows that Warner Bros. produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “Cheyenne” and “Maverick” were both successful shows, but when you look at them today they mainly attest to the cost-cutting regime at the studio.
The shows are chock full of stock footage drawn from old WB westerns; anytime there’s a long shot of a town or more than ten people in a scene, you can rest assured that it’s taken from an old Errol Flynn movie, often in muddy B&W dubbed down from Technicolor.
Both shows attest to the back-lot ethos that went into producing TV in this era, one shared by other westerns such as “The Rifleman,” “Have Gun, Will Travel,” “Gunsmoke” and the rest. The production standards for “The Rifleman” are particularly shoddy, but that was typical of the period - small black and white TV screens covered a multitude of sins wrought by low budgets.
But “The Rifleman” - and, to a lesser extent, “Have Gun, Will Travel” -compensated for their limited visuals with strong, character-oriented scripts, and some good directors. Joseph Newman directed a lot of “The Rifleman” episodes, while Andrew McLaglen and Richard Donner cut their teeth on “Have Gun, Will Travel.”
But there’s not a lot of distinguished talent behind the camera on the Warner Bros. shows, just journeyman professionals earning a paycheck.
In other words, a lot like TV in any era, except they were working in a genre that has lost its mass audience base, which is all the more reason to enjoy it - for its own intrinsic pleasures, as well as for the window it offers into the tastes of other times.
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Peter Sellers, Steve Martin and the real Inspector Clouseau
Steve Martin seems to have built up a reservoir of good will amongst the movie audience that I don’t fully understand. it seems to me that he’s been coasting in the movies for a very long time. At bottom, he strikes me as a gifted sketch comic, which is the obvious reason why his attempted reincarnation of Inspector Clouseau has fallen so flat.
Aside from his gift for sight gags that he made at once clumsy and graceful, and aided considerably by the staging gifts of Blake Edwards - in his prime a great comic director - Sellers’ Clouseau had a soul. It’s clear that Sellers as a man was some kind of weird schizophrenic, but it’s also clear that as an actor he was some weird kind of genius. His Clouseau was a fool, but a fool with dignity who yearned for the beautiful women that saw him only as a joke.
But Martin’s Clouseau doesn’t have a third dimension, and barely has two. It’s just another cartoonish bit in a career full of them: funny for five minutes on Saturday Night Live, but not for 90 minutes.
It’s not that I think Martin is untalented. His plays and the novel are all serious works by a serious man, but I found his autobiography slightly disturbing - objective to the point of remoteness. It’s clear that he never really inhabited his comic character, but used it as a means to an end: getting the audience to laugh.
But inhabiting his characters is all Sellers ever did, which is why we watch The Pink Panther movies and “Dr. Strangelove” and “Being There” with something more than delight; we watch with awe at a total transformation that never winks at the audience.
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The archivist cometh, or “Mr. DeMille wouldn’t like this!”
The story goes that when Cecil B. DeMille’s archives were being packed up for donation some 20 years after his death, Florence Cole, a secretary who had worked for DeMille, walked around the dozens of stacks of boxes and said, over and over again, with terminal dismay, “Mr. DeMille wouldn’t like this.”
I know just how she felt.
This past weekend, James D’Arc of Brigham Young University came and packed up the archives I’ve accumulated over the last 20-odd years of writing books. My stuff will be in good company - the papers of Howard Hawks, James Stewart, Max Steiner and, yes, Cecil B. DeMille, among many others, are also at BYU.
But Jesus, what a weird feeling!
It’s a combination of loss and futility - to see pieces of paper that once constituted heart-skipping discoveries packed up calls into question the vast emotional store biographers set by those pieces of paper, as well as stimulate the vague wish that I’d spent my working life doing something healthier, something that would get me out of doors more often.
Realistic? Not really - scholarship is my nature, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
The assembled boxes totaled 250 pounds, and there’s more heading to BYU, as soon as I manage to plow through and copy some files that I might be needing in the future. The end result is that my office is considerably less crowded, and my German Shepherd can once more sit in the office and keep me company while I write, but I feel like a recent amputee; there’s a phantom pain where my left hand used to be.
Upside: while Jim and I were packing, I stumbled across a large file of Douglas Fairbanks material I’d been hoarding for a biography I mean to write someday but had lost track of seven or eight years ago. (And to forestall the inevitable questions, Jeffrey Vance’s book is all right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough and besides, Vance writes with his thumbs.)
If I keep looking, I just might find Judge Crater in there…
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I remember thinking something must have happened to the Columbia vaults years ago, because in the late 70s-early 80s, most prints I saw of thier older films on TV appeared to be bad dupes-especially “Caine Mutiny”, which looked like it was filmed
... read the full comment by Steve Burns | Comment on Spencer Tracy and "Man's Castle" Read Spencer Tracy and "Man's Castle"
I remember thinking something must have happened to the Columbia vaults years ago, because in the late 70s-early 80s, most prints I saw of thier older films on TV appeared to be bad dupes-especially “Caine Mutiny”, which looked like it was filmed
... read the full comment by Steve Burns | Comment on Spencer Tracy and "Man's Castle" Read Spencer Tracy and "Man's Castle"
I’ve been doing some reading about Henry Ford and the beginning of Ford Mtr Co and your comments about Charlie C and his son are virtual parallels of Henry and his son Edsel.
... read the full comment by Paul Andres | Comment on Sydney Chaplin RIP Read Sydney Chaplin RIP
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