Introduction: Again With Those Pesky Values In choosing between Charlie Chaplin, René Clair and Fritz Lang for best director of 1930-31, I take comfort in the fact that I can't get the answer wrong. These are three of the greatest directors of all time, each at the top of his game, each producing a commercially- and critically-acclaimed masterpiece regarded by many, including me, to be the best work of each man's career.
But then as I've implied before, possibly without stating it explicitly, the actual winner of any given alternate Oscar I call the Katie Awards is irrelevant—the whole exercise is simply a narrative hook to keep this otherwise meandering blog pointed in one direction, the future, while taking an inordinate amount of time to talk about the past. If by handing out an award named for the undeniably great and award-worthy Katie-Bar-The-Door, I can get you to read about the likes of Clara Bow and Buster Keaton—or better yet, get you to watch the likes of Clara Bow and Buster Keaton—then I will have accomplished my mission.
Not to mention, I get to watch the likes of Clara Bow and Buster Keaton and that's even better.
Here's another unstated truth about the Katie Awards: beyond a simple recitation of the facts, talking about movies, like talking about the Beatles or baseball, is really a way for two people to talk about their values without the emotionally-charged and potentially-divisive need to ratchet up the stakes to the breaking point. You like Paul better than John? Well, who am I to argue with a matter of taste? (Although I've been tempted to do violence to those who suggest Ringo was just along for the ride. But then every man has his line in the sand.) A person who tells you Casablanca is his favorite movie is revealing something very different from a person who says Fight Club is his favorite movie (a person who tells you the latest Transformers sequel is his favorite movie needs to see more movies).
Thus, wittingly or not, when I've written about The General and Sunrise, the Marx Brothers, Marie Dressler and the aforementioned Clara Bow, I've really been writing about myself, my values, my experiences. I've just sweetened my narcissism with a tasty coating of film analysis and movie trivia—not to mention a sackful of photos of Louise Brooks.
So given that the contest between Chaplin, Clair and Lang is essentially a three-way tie, what do I reveal about myself in choosing Lang over the others?
Auteur Theory: Flogging A Dead Horse Well, for one thing, even though I think Robert Osborne, film historian and classy host of Turner Classic Movies, is a national treasure and second only to Katie-Bar-The-Door on the list of America's greatest living citizens (I'd rather have his job than play centerfield for the New York Yankees), I don't agree with his stated belief (which I read once upon a time in Now Playing) that the best director of the year is per se whoever directed the best movie of year. I mean, I see his point, particularly if he buys into the auteur theory of film criticism, that the director is the principal author of a movie, and if you subscribe to the theory, you no doubt agree with him.
The problem with this particular line of thinking, though, at least to my mind, is that it doesn't actually describe the reality of filmmaking, especially not in Hollywood, certainly not during the studio era when movies were made on an assembly line model, and certainly not these days during the era of bean counters and $20 million movie stars.
Not that there's much question about who authored the films in question here—Clair wrote and directed Le Million, Lang co-wrote M with his wife, Thea von Harbou, and Chaplin, well, he was a one-man studio, writing, directing, producing, editing, scoring and starring in City Lights. All three of these directors are the epitome of the auteur theory.
It's all the other directors of great movies who don't fit the theory that concern me. Consider, for example, Top Hat, the best of the Astaire-Rogers musicals. Mark Sandrich directed the movie, but Hermes Pan choreographed the dances, Fred Astaire determined how to photograph them, Ginger Rogers insisted on the dresses she wore, Irving Berlin wrote the songs, Van Nest Polglase designed the sets, Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott wrote the jokes, Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore performed those jokes with their usual impeccable timing, and producer Pandro Berman signed off on the whole thing. It was even Astaire and Rogers who decided when the dancing was done.
So Sandrich was the director of Top Hat, but in what sense was he the author of Top Hat? Yet Top Hat is one of the greatest movies ever made.
The auteur theory also undervalues studio directors—directors under contract who received their assignments from the studio on a seemingly random basis—men such as Michael Curtiz, a studio director with no discernible style or theme who nevertheless managed to give us Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels With Dirty Faces, Captain Blood, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Mildred Pierce, among others. He ran the set of Casablanca with an iron hand and was indispensable to the movie's final pace, look and feel. And yet no one called Curtiz an auteur, not even Curtiz himself. Should we pretend he didn't exist or that his contribution shouldn't be recognized?
Admittedly, criticizing the auteur theory at this late date is like Glenn Beck ranting about socialism on Fox News—the boat sailed on both these movements decades ago. But even though it was long ago discredited, auteur theory continues to influence how we talk about directors and I'm just saying I will make a conscience effort to keep it in the corner where it belongs, trotting it out when it applies but otherwise discourage it from barking at the neighbors and scaring away visitors.
Because although I'm going to try to separate the flour from the cake and evaluate each contri- bution to the finished product on its own merits, judging directors just as I do writers, actors, editors and cinematographers, as one of the ingredients of a larger whole, I believe there's no more collaborative art form than motion pictures, and to contend that you need only decide what the best picture of a given year was to know who the best director was is to ignore a hundred-plus years of movie history to the contrary—and the one thing we never ignore here at the Monkey is history.
History and Katie-Bar-The-Door, that is.
Which is my way of saying that I haven't made up my mind which of M and City Lights was the best picture of 1930-31 and if in the end my choice for the top prize is inconsistent with my choice for best director, well, so be it.
Chaplin's City Lights: A Lyrical Silence What else? Well, first, let's dispense (reluctantly) with René Clair. As George Orwell pointed out (either in Animal Farm or on ESPN's Sportscenter), in a contest between equals, some are more equal than others; and while Clair's direction was innovative and influential, and while Le Million was well-nigh perfect—warm, witty, lyrical—I wouldn't necessarily nominate it as the prime example of its particular genre, the musical comedy. There are just too many other titles that come to mind—Singin' in the Rain, A Night at the Opera, the movies of Astaire and Rogers, or even, arguably, Clair's own À Nous La Liberté—before most people think of Le Million. Maybe an oversight Katie and I can correct, but a fact nevertheless.
On the other hand, if City Lights and M are not the best examples of their genres (silent/Chaplin/rom-com and serial killer/police procedural/suspense thriller, respectively), then they're close, and I wouldn't mind spending an evening watching the fifteen rounders between City Lights and The General, and M, Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs. René Clair would win the prize in nearly any other year, but in 1930-31's three-way battle of movie titans, the tiniest of margins is enough to put Clair on the mat.
Well, then, why not Chaplin? After all, City Lights is one of the movies—along with The Kid, The Gold Rush and Modern Times—I'd hang my hat on if you've never seen Chaplin, and if you're only going to see one, see this one. To me, its only real competition for the designation of Best Silent Movie Ever is The General, and I'd hate to live on the difference. In terms of the finished product, Chaplin was never more sure-footed than he was here and City Lights represents a kind of perfect summing-up of everything he was trying to accomplish in his career.
But ironically, it's this act of summing up that puts Chaplin behind Lang in the best director sweepstakes, at least for me. All things being equal (the operative word here being equal), I give extra credit to the director who breaks new ground, provides an early clue to the new direction and influences everything that comes after.
Once he saw that talkies were not just a passing fad but were instead the future, Chaplin reacted not as Lang and Clair did, by making artistic use of the new technology despite initial misgivings, but by thumbing his nose at it (in the first scene of City Lights, literally). Chaplin believed talkies would rob the Tramp of his universal appeal, and he was probably right: a silent Tramp is an everyman, Eastern European, American, Italian—whoever is sitting in the audience—but a speaking Tramp turned out to be a wealthy, educated filmmaker from London and while he was still funny and sympathetic, he wasn't us. Caught between the rapidly receding past and the unforgiving future, Chaplin opted for the past.
The result was a magnificent movie and a ballsy gesture—rage, rage against the dying of the light!—that only the enormous box office power of his name would allow Chaplin to get away with. But it's not the sort of thing anyone else could emulate or build upon. The silence of City Lights is the sound of a door closing, end of an era, exclamation point. Nowhere to go from there but home.
M, on the other hand, looks like it could have been made yesterday—and in terms of its subject matter, probably was made yesterday, at least a pale imitation of it anyway. Lang not only made the definitive example of the serial killer movie, he simultaneously invented it. In doing so, he turned his gaze unflinchingly toward the future, not just of film but of the bloodiest century in human history.
Before I leave the subject of Chaplin, would it be churlish of me to point out that if he hadn't owned his own studio, he would almost certainly have been fired as director of City Lights? He took three years to craft his movie, famously filming nearly four hundred takes of the pivotal scene where the blind flowergirl, Virginia Cherrill, mistakes the Tramp for a millionaire—indeed, Chaplin eventually shut down production for six months while he puzzled over the question (the slamming of a car door did the trick).
And while the economics of filmmaking were very different then—Buster Keaton once explained that an independent director, such as himself or Chaplin, owned rather than rented his cameras, and the crew and actors were on straight salary whether they worked or not, so essentially he was only paying for film and sets—working for three years on a silent movie as the sound era unfolded was an enormous financial and artistic gamble and only Chaplin the producer would have allowed Chaplin the director to get away with it.
All of which sounds like a knock on Chaplin; it isn't. It's just that it's enough to separate him from Lang. As with Clair, in any other year I would hand Chaplin the award for best director. Just not this year.
Next Up: Fritz Lang (Part Two): M: The Unseen Horror and The Life and Legacy Of Fritz Lang
And the current carries us farther yet from the essay for best director of 1930-31 ...
The ever reliable Wikipedia describes cognitive dissonance as that "uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously" and suggests that most people instinctively try to bring the two ideas into harmony by either changing their belief structure so the two ideas are no longer in conflict or rationalizing away one of the two ideas, again to reduce the conflict.
Yesterday's seemingly innocent picture of Errol Flynn inadvertently created a lot of cognitive dissonance when, between Douglas Fairbanks's dirty joking and my own curiosity, we discovered that Flynn's already shady past cast darker shadows than we here at the Monkey had imagined. Not just a "dashing ladies man who drank too much and tickled Basil Rathbone's ribs with the blade," as I put it on Thingy's blog, "Pondering Life," Flynn was a serial seducer of underage girls (tried in 1943 but acquitted on charges of raping two teenagers and engaged to marry a fifteen year old at the time of his death in 1959), as well as, at least on one documented occasion, an anti-Semitic blowhard.
One biographer has even charged he was a spy for Hitler's Germany (although others contend he was a leftist drinking buddy of Fidel Castro's and the British government a few years ago revealed that during the last days of World War II, Flynn was actually a spy for the British).
In any event, nasty business.
Which is a bit of a problem because I, for one, like Errol Flynn's movies, particularly The Adventures of Robin Hood. Am I required to like Errol Flynn as well or otherwise have to explain away his private behavior before I can admit to such? Or should I just stop watching his movies altogether?
The instinctive sense that I need to choose one of these options is cognitive dissonance.
There was an even bigger example of cognitive dissonance in the movie-fan blogosphere recently when Switzerland arrested Roman Polanski in advance of extraditing him to the United States to face sentencing following his 1978 guilty plea to unlawful sexual intercourse—a subject I hadn't planned to address in any fashion until my cryogenically-frozen head reaches 1974's Chinatown in this blog, sometime around the turn of the next century.
In my notes for the essay about the best director of 1974 (yes, I've made notes that far ahead— I've even written about Amy Adams's 2008 performance in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day and Lord knows you'll be waiting forever before I get around to posting it), I have written: "Judgment of Polanski the man I leave to you, to God, to history, to Polanski's own withered conscience and to the appropriate legal authorities in any event. I certainly wouldn't want anything I've said about Polanski the artist to be construed as a defense of Polanski the man."
That's pretty much how I feel about Errol Flynn. And a lot of other people, too.
The farther I get into blogging about movies and their history, the clearer it becomes that the people who made great movies weren't necessarily great people, and certainly what you see on the screen doesn't reflect what you would have seen in their private lives. John Ford was an insufferable bastard, Henry Fonda was a terrible father, Woody Allen married his girlfriend's daughter. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist, Ward Bond hated Communists, Elia Kazan informed on his friends. Veronica Lake earned the nickname "the Bitch," Margaret Sullavan was a depressed alcoholic and Betty Hutton was as crazy as an outhouse rat. Clark Gable had bad breath and Joan Crawford's and Marilyn Monroe's legendary shortcomings I dare say you know about.
Renee Zellweger was reportedly so difficult on the set of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason that afterwards her co-stars Hugh Grant and Colin Firth announced their (thankfully short-lived) retirements from the movies. Jane Greer, on the other hand, was as sweet as chess pie, as loyal as a faithful dog and as brave as your average Marine, but that doesn't mean she wasn't absolutely riveting as the murderous femme fatale Kathy Moffit in the noir classic, Out of the Past.
There are any number of ways you can handle unpleasant information about the people who make movies. My father refused to watch Jane Fonda because of her politics; my mother-in-law still won't watch John Wayne because of his. Which is a pity from the point of view of the movie fan because it means you miss out on Klute and The Searchers, two great movies with two great performances that, I'll tip my hand now, will win their respective stars Katie Awards.
You can also go the other way and excuse behavior of your heroes you would never forgive of your enemies. Thus you'll find plenty of petitions seeking to free Roman Polanski despite committing a crime you'd insist your neighbor be buried for. Our brains are hard-wired that way, or so scientists tell us, something to remember the next you (or I) want to beat someone senseless for taking a position we don't agree with, but there's not much future for the republic if we're forever choosing to behave like territorial pack animals.
In writing this blog, I have opted for a third way. I have in the past and will continue in the future to distill out the professional from the personal, the on-screen persona from the private one, and though I have written about both, and will continue to do so, I've been choosing awards and reviewing movies strictly based on the former. Some of the winners have been creeps and some have been saints, but all of them have done something on screen that I think is worth your time and attention.
It's either that or stop writing about movies altogether. But then anything you write is guaranteed to offend somebody. After all, I imagine there are still some people out there who insist the world is flat. You can't please everybody.
So when 1938 rolls around, I will go ahead and lavish praise on The Adventures of Robin Hood and its star, Errol Flynn, no matter what he may or may not have done when he wasn't wearing green tights and a feather in his cap.
Thingy of the blog "Pondering Life" (I read it every day) has admitted to having a thingy for Errol Flynn.
Flynn made his first movie in 1933 and his first great one, Captain Blood, in 1935 (and then a slew of great ones after that, especially The Adventures of Robin Hood). If we can look ahead to Jean Harlow, we can look ahead to Errol Flynn.
Of the first 1300 words of my essay on the best director of 1930-31, I've written about the Beatles, baseball, Robert Osborne, Glenn Beck, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Casablanca and the baking of cakes, but I haven't written about Charles Chaplin, René Clair or Fritz Lang—perhaps a significant oversight given that the essay is about one of them.
Obviously, this is taking longer than I had intended.
In the meantime, here is some eye candy for both sexes: Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in 1931's elegant, trash-tastic romance/spy-thriller, Mata Hari.
It's director René Clair's birthday today. One more opportunity to urge you to put Le Million and À Nous La Liberté on your Netflix queue. If you like the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, the Three Stooges, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy or any of that kind of comedy, and you're the least bit curious, there's no reason not to take a chance on either of these films.
(And a happy birthday to the late, great Kurt Vonnegut, too. If it's 1931 in my blog, he would have been a nine year old boy in Indianapolis, no doubt making his way to the local theater to soak up Warner Baxter in The Cisco Kid, a sequel to the Oscar-winning Western In Old Arizona. Or if he was lucky, he was watching Jean Harlow in Platinum Blonde. But let's face it; nine year old boy? It was The Cisco Kid.)
Oh, and if you're in a mood to remember why we take the day off every November 11th, track down a copy of All Quiet On The Western Front and meditate for a while on "the war to end all wars." The first of several such wars, as it turned out ...
This is probably the richest crop of Katie nominees for best director you'll see for a long while—the three greatest directors of the era each producing the best movie of his career, all within a four month span.
Charles Chaplin (City Lights) René Clair (Le Million) Fritz Lang (M) In fact, 1931 was a good year for directors all the way around: Tod Browning (Dracula), William A. Wellman (The Public Enemy) and James Whale (Frankenstein) (more about him in 1931-32) also served up what were arguably their best movies. Maybe there was something in the water.
(Oh, and what do I think was the best year for directors ever? It happened fifty years ago in 1959 when six of the greatest directors of all time—Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Yasujiro Ozu, Francois Truffaut, Billy Wilder and William Wyler—produced what may well have been the best movies of their careers, Rio Bravo, North By Northwest, Floating Weeds, The 400 Blows, Some Like It Hot and Ben-Hur, respectively. Not to mention that Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film Wild Strawberries was released in the United States in 1959. And there was also Anatomy of a Murder, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Pillow Talk, Imitation of Life, Black Orpheus and Ballad of a Soldier, possibly the best movies ever from their directors. Even Ed Wood, God bless him, gave us Plan 9 From Outer Space. And I haven't even mentioned Oscar winners Room at the Top and The Diary Of Anne Frank. Good year to be a movie goer.)
Did yesterday's posting of Our Dancing Daughters whet your appetite for more Joan Crawford? Well. Long thought lost, Our Waltzing Whelps would have been the fourth movie in the Joan Crawford Flapper Trilogy. Fortunately, a fragment of this film was recently discovered by me just now in one of my notebooks. So without further fanfare, Our Waltzing Whelps, starring Joan Crawford and Anita Page, filmed in state of the art MonkeyVision.
I believe I promised that if any part of the Joan Crawford Flapper Trilogy showed up on the internet, I'd let you know about it. The first leg of the trilogy, Our Dancing Daughters ("leg" being the operative word, as you will see), is back up on YouTube. I present part one here for your no doubt temporary viewing pleasure and provide links to the other eight parts which might otherwise be a bit difficult to track down.
Our Dancing Daughters was the first movie written specifically for Joan Crawford and it made her a star. It's the story of a rich, wild girl (Crawford) with an addiction to short dresses and the Charleston who loses the love of her life to an even richer, wilder girl (Anita Page, also in a star-making role), all while soaking up Jazz and bootleg booze in fabulous art Deco palaces that could only have existed on the set of an MGM movie. None of this is meant to be taken seriously—just another Hollywood studio clucking its tongue at girls gone wild even as it exploited the phenomenon to rake in box office bucks.
What's not to like?
Hopefully one day Turner Classic Movies in association with Warner Brothers will issue the entire trilogy in one tasty DVD package. Until then it remains unavailable in any format. Pity.
By the way, Our Dancing Daughters is one of those odd silent-sound hybrids of the very early sound era. Made not long after The Jazz Singer, the film has a soundtrack, including several prominently featured songs, but no dialogue, only title cards. I actually find this approach preferable to early talkies such as The Broadway Melody where, for example, Anita Page's dialogue competes with the rustling of her own dress.
Fortunately, sound technology improved rapidly over the course of a year.
Anyway, here it is: Our Dancing Daughters. I hope you get as much of a kick (turn-turn-kick-turn) out of it as I do.
Note: For those of you who prefer not to watch your movies in bite-size nuggets on a screen the size of your thumb, Our Dancing Daughters is scheduled to air on TCM on February 12, 2010 at 10:30 a.m. EST. I've already marked my calendar; be sure to mark yours.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
What is a Mythical Monkey?
An infinite number of monkeys typing at an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time will eventually produce Shakespeare's Hamlet. This is the blog of one such monkey.
Introduction: Again With Those Pesky Values
Here's another unstated truth about the Katie Awards: beyond a simple recitation of the facts, talking about movies, like talking about the Beatles or baseball, is really a way for two people to talk about their values without the emotionally-charged and potentially-divisive need to ratchet up the stakes to the breaking point. You like Paul better than John? Well, who am I to argue with a matter of taste? (Although I've been tempted to do violence to those who suggest Ringo was just along for the ride. But then every man has his line in the sand.) A person who tells you Casablanca is his favorite movie is revealing something very different from a person who says Fight Club is his favorite movie (a person who tells you the latest Transformers sequel is his favorite movie needs to see more movies).
Auteur Theory: Flogging A Dead Horse
It's all the other directors of great movies who don't fit the theory that concern me. Consider, for example, Top Hat, the best of the Astaire-Rogers musicals. Mark Sandrich directed the movie, but Hermes Pan choreographed the dances, Fred Astaire determined how to photograph them, Ginger Rogers insisted on the dresses she wore, Irving Berlin wrote the songs, Van Nest Polglase designed the sets, Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott wrote the jokes, Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore performed those jokes with their usual impeccable timing, and producer Pandro Berman signed off on the whole thing. It was even Astaire and Rogers who decided when the dancing was done.
The auteur theory also undervalues studio directors—directors under contract who received their assignments from the studio on a seemingly random basis—men such as Michael Curtiz, a studio director with no discernible style or theme who nevertheless managed to give us Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels With Dirty Faces, Captain Blood, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Mildred Pierce, among others. He ran the set of Casablanca with an iron hand and was indispensable to the movie's final pace, look and feel. And yet no one called Curtiz an auteur, not even Curtiz himself. Should we pretend he didn't exist or that his contribution shouldn't be recognized?
Because although I'm going to try to separate the flour from the cake and evaluate each contri- bution to the finished product on its own merits, judging directors just as I do writers, actors, editors and cinematographers, as one of the ingredients of a larger whole, I believe there's no more collaborative art form than motion pictures, and to contend that you need only decide what the best picture of a given year was to know who the best director was is to ignore a hundred-plus years of movie history to the contrary—and the one thing we never ignore here at the Monkey is history.
Chaplin's City Lights: A Lyrical Silence
Once he saw that talkies were not just a passing fad but were instead the future, Chaplin reacted not as Lang and Clair did, by making artistic use of the new technology despite initial misgivings, but by thumbing his nose at it (in the first scene of City Lights, literally). Chaplin believed talkies would rob the Tramp of his universal appeal, and he was probably right: a silent Tramp is an everyman, Eastern European, American, Italian—whoever is sitting in the audience—but a speaking Tramp turned out to be a wealthy, educated filmmaker from London and while he was still funny and sympathetic, he wasn't us. Caught between the rapidly receding past and the unforgiving future, Chaplin opted for the past.
And while the economics of filmmaking were very different then—Buster Keaton once explained that an independent director, such as himself or Chaplin, owned rather than rented his cameras, and the crew and actors were on straight salary whether they worked or not, so essentially he was only paying for film and sets—working for three years on a silent movie as the sound era unfolded was an enormous financial and artistic gamble and only Chaplin the producer would have allowed Chaplin the director to get away with it.
