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You know, every once in a while you're faced with something so perfect—the Sistine Chapel, Secretariat at the Belmont, John Lennon's vocal on "Twist and Shout"—you can actually hear the music of the spheres as they move through the eternal ether.
When I watch Astaire and Rogers dance, I reconsider the possibility that maybe there is a heaven after all.
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: The 39 Steps (prod. Michael Balcon)
nominees: Bride Of Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr. and James Whale); The Informer (prod. John Ford); Mutiny On The Bounty (prod. Frank Lloyd and Irving Thalberg)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Top Hat (prod. Pandro S. Berman)
nominees: A Night At The Opera (prod. Irving Thalberg); Ruggles of Red Gap (Arthur Hornblow, Jr.)
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: La kermesse héroïque (Carnival In Flanders) (prod. Pierre Guerlais)
ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Charles Laughton (Mutiny On The Bounty)
nominees: Ronald Colman (A Tale Of Two Cities); Robert Donat (The 39 Steps); Errol Flynn (Captain Blood); Boris Karloff (Bride Of Frankenstein)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Marx Brothers (A Night At The Opera)
nominees: Fred Astaire (Top Hat); W.C. Fields (The Man on the Flying Trapeze); Charles Laughton (Ruggles Of Red Gap)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Katharine Hepburn (Alice Adams and Sylvia Scarlet)
nominees: Greta Garbo (Anna Karenina)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Ginger Rogers (Top Hat)
nominees: Margaret Sullavan (The Good Fairy); Shirley Temple (The Little Colonel, Our Little Girl, Curly Top and The Littlest Rebel)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps)
nominees: John Ford (The Informer); James Whale (Bride Of Frankenstein)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Sam Wood (A Night At The Opera)
nominees: Leo McCarey (Ruggles Of Red Gap); Mark Sandrich (Top Hat); William Wyler (The Good Fairy)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Edward Everett Horton (Top Hat)
nominees: W.C. Fields (David Copperfield); Charles Laughton (Les Miserables); Charlie Ruggles (Ruggles Of Red Gap); Franchot Tone (The Lives Of A Bengal Lancer and Mutiny On The Bounty); Ernest Thesiger (Bride of Frankenstein)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Elsa Lanchester (Bride Of Frankenstein)
nominees: Peggy Ashcroft (The 39 Steps); Mary Boland (Ruggles Of Red Gap); Una O'Connor (Bride Of Frankenstein and The Informer); Edna May Oliver (David Copperfield and A Tale Of Two Cities)
SCREENPLAY
winner: Dudley Nichols, from a story by Liam O'Flaherty (The Informer)
nominees: William Hurlbut (screenplay), adaptation by William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston (Bride Of Frankenstein); W.P. Lipscomb, from the novel by Victor Hugo (Les Misérables); George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, story by James Kevin McGuinness (A Night At The Opera); Charles Bennett (adaptation), Ian Hay (dialogue) and Alma Reville (continuity) (The 39 Steps)
SPECIAL AWARDS
John J. Mescall (Bride of Frankenstein) (Cinematography); Charles D. Hall (Bride of Frankenstein) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Gilbert Kurland (Bride of Frankenstein) (Sound); Herbert Stothart (Mutiny on the Bounty) (Score); "Cheek To Cheek" (Top Hat) Music and Lyrics by Irving Berlin (Song); Derek Twist (The 39 Steps) (Film Editing)
Blog about movies long enough and eventually you discover Dennis Cozzalio's fabulous website, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, and his justly-famous film quizzes, which have become something of a semi-annual rite of passage.
As Beveridge D. Spencer so eloquently put it, "You know those dreams you have where you're in school with no pants on and there's a test that you didn't study for because you don't go to school any more, you're a grown up darn it? Well, that dream just came true! Unless you're wearing pants. Or still in school."
Seriously, these are wickedly hard tests.
It's been a while since Dennis posted one, but this month we get Professor Ed Avery's Cortizone-Fueled, Bigger-Than-Life, Super Big Gulp-Sized Summer Movie Quiz.
Here are my answers ...
1) Depending on your mood, your favorite or least-loved movie cliché
Least loved movie-making cliche would be the hand-held, barf-inducing shaky cam, coupled with frenetic editing and poorly-composed, poorly-thought-out action sequences. See, e.g., every summer action movie made in the last ten years.
Least loved story-telling cliche—admittedly more a problem with series television than movies—is where a central character does something that in the real world would land them in jail, the brig or at the very least, the unemployment line, but which the authority figure ultimately excuses because, dammit, the character is so good at their job. In the real world, nobody is that good at their job. See, e.g., MASH, House, Battlestar Galactica.
Favorite movie cliche is no doubt the traditional rom-com story arc ...
2) Regardless of whether or not you eventually caught up with it, which film classic have you lied about seeing in the past?
Maybe because I'm a lawyer, one of my pet peeves is people who insist on lying and then do a lousy job of it, spinning elaborate yarns filled with ridiculous exaggerations or easily-disputed alibis. If you must lie, remember: keep it simple, stick as closely to the facts as you can and then either omit the offending information or feign a misunderstanding of the situation.
In the long run, honesty is definitely the best policy, if only to establish your credibility down the road for the really big lie. As a matter of fact, the best lie of all is the truth. Master that paradox and you can rule the world.
3) Roland Young or Edward Everett Horton?
Love them both, but got to go with Edward Everett Horton, from pre-Code Lubitsch and Astaire-Rogers comedies, all the way to the narration of "Fractured Fairytales" on Rocky and Bullwinkle.
4) Second favorite Frank Tashlin movie
Son of Paleface? Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? One of his Porky Pig cartoons from the 1930s? Truth is, Susan Slept Here is the only Frank Tashlin movie I really like.
5) Clockwork Orange-- yes or no?
I have seen A Clockwork Orange many times ...
6) Best/favorite use of gender dysphoria in a horror film (Ariel Schudson)
Does Norman Bates count? It's a stretch, admittedly. As a general rule, using gender dysphoria as a horror device isn't really my cup o' tea.
7) Melanie Laurent or Blake Lively?
Mélanie Laurent, based on her work in Inglorious Basterds. I confess, I have no idea who Blake Lively is. Does that make me old?
8) Best movie of 2011 (so far…)
Couldn't tell you. The best feature film I saw for the first time in 2011 (so far) is Stella Maris, the 1918 Mary Pickford movie.
9) Favorite screen performer with a noticeable facial deformity (Peg Aloi)
Huh?
10) Lars von Trier: shithead or misunderstood comic savant? (Dean Treadway)
The first one.
11) Timothy Carey or Henry Silva?
Henry Silva for his work as the Korean interpreter in The Manchurian Candidate.
12) Low-profile writer who deserves more attention from critics and /or audiences
The Mythical Monkey
13) Movie most recently viewed theatrically, and on DVD, Blu-ray or streaming
Theatrically? Maybe North By Northwest at the AFI.
DVD/Blu-Ray or streaming? The Heart of Texas Ryan a.k.a. Single Shot Parker, a 1917 western starring Tom Mix.
14) Favorite film noir villain
Jane Greer's Kathy Moffitt from Out of the Past.
15) Best thing about streaming movies?
Cheap, plentiful and immediate. Which is three things ...
16) Fay Spain or France Nuyen? (Peter Nellhaus)
I'm a fan of both countries, but have never heard of either actress.
17) Favorite Kirk Douglas that isn’t called Spartacus (Peter Nellhaus)
Chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole. But I could name ten Kirk Douglas movies off the top of my head I like better than Spartacus.
18) Favorite movie about cars
Used Cars
19) Audrey Totter or Marie Windsor?
Marie Windsor, one of the greatest noir B-actresses ever.
20) Existing Stephen King movie adaptation that could use an remake/reboot/overhaul
Re-boot this, pal.
21) Low-profile director who deserves more attention from critics and/or audiences
If he's alive and I've heard of him, he can't be all that low profile.
22) What actor that you previously enjoyed has become distracting or a self-parody? (Adam Ross)
Ronald Reagan. If the real Reagan were alive today, Republicans would drum him out of the party as a left-wing RINO. Which tells you everything you need to know about the current state of the Republican Party.
23) Best place in the world to see a movie
Lying on my couch with Katie-Bar-The-Door and our dog.
24) Charles McGraw or Sterling Hayden?
Is this a trick question? Sterling Hayden, of course, protector of our precious bodily fluids.
25) Second favorite Yasujiro Ozu film
I Was Born, But ..., behind only Tokyo Story.
26) Most memorable horror movie father figure
Do they have fathers in horror movies?
27) Name a non-action-oriented movie that would be fun to see in Sensurround (Sal Gomez)
I'm actually old enough to remember Sensurround first hand. The correct answer is: None.
28) Chris Evans or Ryan Reynolds?
Ryan Reynolds looked vaguely familiar when I googled him, so Ryan Reynolds.
29) Favorite relatively unknown supporting player, from either or both the classic and the modern era
Eugene Pallette, Edward Arnold, James Gleason, Jack Carson ... the list goes on and on.
30) Real-life movie location you most recently visited or saw
Well, I see Washington, D.C., practically every day.
31) Second favorite Budd Boetticher movie
So far as I can tell, when it came to motion pictures, Budd Boetticher directed pure crap, but he was the assistant director on The More the Merrier, starring Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur, so I'll say that. Oh, wait, that would be my favorite Boetticher movie. So, um, one of the episodes of Maverick he directed.
32) Mara Corday or Julie Adams?
Julie Adams, for all her television work.
33) Favorite Universal-International western
Amazing what you can find out with the advanced search function at Imdb.com. Probably Winchester '73.
34) Favorite actress of the silent era
Musidora. This week.
35) Best Eugene Pallette performance (Larry Aydlette)
My Man Godfrey
36) Best/worst remake of the 21st century so far? (Dan Aloi)
Haven't seen a lot of remakes. The Manchurian Candidate, which I saw on cable, wasn't good, though.
37) What could multiplex owners do right now to improve the theatrical viewing experience for moviegoers? What could moviegoers do?
Slash ticket prices and turn off their electronic devices, respectively.
Postscript: Some time between when I cut-and-pasted the questions from Sergio Leone and when I posted my answer, Dennis added a question, which was number 34 on his list: What's the biggest "gimmick" that's drawn you out to see a movie? (Sal Gomez)
Presumably that means ever, because no mere gimmick has drawn me out to the theater in years. But within my lifetime, I would have to say the "dinner-and-a-movie date" concept has drawn me out to more movies than any other gimmick.
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. To read Part Two of this essay, click here. To read Part Three of this essay, click here.]
IV. Design For Living: Screwball Before There Was Screwball
In Trouble In Paradise, with its depictions of thieves living happily ever after, Ernst Lubitsch had pushed the limits of pre-Code permissiveness; with his next picture, Design For Living, he blew right past those limits. Design For Living was by far the naughtiest movie he made in a career filled with naughty movies.
The story of a woman who loves two men and makes them like it, Design For Living was based on Noel Coward's play about his own tangled relationship with Broadway's most famous acting couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, a triangle marked by professional and romantic jealousy, and self-destructive egotism. So personal was the story, Coward refused to stage it until Lunt and Fontanne were available to appear in it, with Coward himself playing the third lead.
After acquiring the film rights to the play, Lubitsch initially asked Broadway playwright Samson Raphaelson, fresh off the success of Trouble In Paradise, to handle the screenwriting chores. Raphaelson declined, I suspect because as a Hollywood screenwriter he knew he couldn't produce a script faithful to the original play, and as a creature of Broadway, had no desire to cross a man of Coward's reputation.
So Lubitsch brought in Hollywood's foremost screenwriter, Ben Hecht, who had written the script for 1932's gangster classic Scarface (and would later pen Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious). Like Raphaelson, Hecht had had success on the stage (with The Front Page), but he'd made his name as a journalist covering Chicago's seamy, violent underworld and had no patience for the pretensions of Coward's characters. Hecht kept the relationships, the settings and the plot, and discarded the arch dialogue and the self-pitying tone. He also re-imagined the European male leads, Otto and Leo, as the distinctly American Tom and George. More importantly, he shifted the focus of the triangle onto the female character, Gilda, which served to turn a play about the limits of a man's sexual ego into an exploration of female empowerment. (To read more about Hecht, click here.)
Coward had been pleased with Hollywood's adaptation of Private Lives, starring Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery (read my review of it here), but he refused to even see what Lubitsch had made of Design For Living. "I'm told that there are three of my original lines left in the film—such original ones as 'Pass the mustard,'" he quipped later.
Despite criticism at the time, I think Lubitsch and Hecht were right to go off in another direction. The subject matter, with hints of bisexuality, was intensely personal and would have been daring stuff, even for a pre-Code movie. And although the play has its moments (I've read it, but never seen it performed), it is not now regarded as one of Coward's better efforts and is rarely revived. As Coward himself admitted, Design For Living "was liked and disliked, and hated and admired, but never, I think, sufficiently loved by any but its three leading actors."
It's no wonder Lubitsch and Hecht took liberties with the text.
"I offer no apologies to Coward," Lubitsch said, "who knows very well that no picture ever lives up to a play if filmed word for word."
As the movie opens, George (Gary Cooper) and Tom (Fredric March) are, respectively, an unsuccessful painter and an unsuccessful playwright—deservedly so judging by samples of their work. On a train to Paris, they meet Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), a commercial artist not the least bit embarrassed to earn a living painting advertisements of Napoleon in long underwear. She immediately recognizes the innate quality of both men and is determined to give George and Tom the pointers they need to become great artists while taking advantage of their soon-proven talents as lovers.
"A thing happened to me that usually happens to men," she says. "You see, a man can meet two, three or even four women and fall in love with all of them, and then, by a process of, uh, interesting elimination, he is able to decide which one he prefers. But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice. Oh, it's alright for her to try on a hundred hats before she picks one out, but—"
"That's very fine," says Tom, "but which chapeau do you want, madame?"
"Both."
Ironically, a few years before, Lubitsch had before faced the same dilemma in real life—his wife Helene Kraus had an affair with his best friend, writer Hans Kraly—which resulted not in the sophisticated comedy of his movies but in a very public scene and an acrimonious divorce.
Lubitsch sought Ronald Colman and Leslie Howard for the male leads, but Colman wanted too much money and Howard didn't want to risk the comparison to Alfred Lunt, then the most respected actor on Broadway. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was cast opposite Oscar-winner Fredric March, but fell ill shortly before production began, and the part finally fell to Gary Cooper.
For the female lead, Gilda Farrell, Lubitsch turned again to Miriam Hopkins, who had starred in The Smiling Lieutenant and Trouble In Paradise. Hopkins is perfect in the part, never veering too far into either smug certainty or guilt-wracked introspection. Lubitsch always wrote interesting female characters, and Gilda is one of his best. We think of feminism and the sexual revolution as primarily modern movements, a product of baby boomer discontent, but in fact, many movies in the pre-Code era were about strong women insisting on sexual and economic freedom. Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers, who sleeps her way to the top in 1933's Baby Face, was the most ruthless incarnation of the pre-Code feminist, but Lubitsch's Gilda may well have been the strongest.
Edward Everett Horton provides his typically wonderful support as a disapproving stuffed-shirt who finds himself caught in the middle of this ménage à trois.
Design For Living doesn't hit as many notes as Trouble In Paradise, but it tackles the triangular dilemma presented by the former head on and comes up with a perfectly logical, if perfectly insane, solution. Had the pace and performances in Design For Living been a touch more manic, you could credit Lubitsch with inventing the screwball comedy, that distinctly American form of humor that features crazy situations and aggressively loony characters. As it is, you can see that a key component of the screwball style is an inherent lack of sympathy with the screwball character's plight—you're not rooting for him to solve his problem, you're waiting for him to grow up and realize he is the problem—and to the extent that he succeeds or fails determines whether he is the hero or the villain. While the distinction of creating the screwball comedy was reserved for Frank Capra's It Happened One Night and Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century, both released a year later, Design For Living fits neatly within the tradition and should be mentioned when discussing this beloved art form.
Although Mordant Hall of the New York Times praised the film as "a most entertaining and highly sophisticated subject," most critics took Lubitsch to task for departing from the text of Coward's play and panned the movie. But though it won no awards, audiences, at least, were pleased—Design For Living was one of the year's top ten grossing films.
As with its immediate predecessor, Trouble In Paradise, the Hays Office did not certify Design For Living for re-release after the Code took effect in 1934 and the film languished unseen in studio vaults for decades. Even now, it is available on DVD only as part of The Gary Cooper Collection, which also includes such titles as Beau Geste and The Lives Of A Bengal Lancer. It is well worth searching out.
[To read Part Five, click here.]
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. To read Part Two of this essay, click here.]
III. Trouble In Paradise: Champagne and Moonlight
After the success of his naughty operettas, The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour With You (and the failure of a somber anti-war film, Broken Lullaby), Ernst Lubitsch turned his attention to what most critics now point to when they speak of Lubitsch's best work, Trouble In Paradise.
Trouble In Paradise is the story of a pair of sophisticated lovers, Gaston and Lily, who romance and thieve their way across Europe, only to find their happiness threatened by a beautiful young widow who also happens to be the target of their latest scam. Lubitsch based the story on the first act of Laszlo Aladar's failed stageplay, The Honest Finder—a crook finds a rich woman's handbag—and originally thought to do a spoof of the gentleman-thief stories, such as Raffles, The Saint and The Falcon, which were popular at the time. Then Lubitsch and long-time collaborator Samson Raphaelson hit upon the idea of making the thieves a man and a woman, which added both a romance angle and then when they take aim at the widow, a romantic complication.
The gentleman thief is Gaston Monescu, "the man who walked into the Bank of Constantinople and walked out with the Bank of Constantinople." The studio had suggested a young Cary Grant for the role, but as Lubitsch's biographer Scott Eyman noted, in 1932 Grant was still more the Cockney roughneck Archie Leach of his birth than the style icon of later years; and Lubitsch preferred an actor who possessed the sort of cultured aplomb that one can only acquire through experience.
Instead, he chose another English actor, Herbert Marshall, a twenty year veteran of the London stage who was as suave and sophisticated in real life as the gentleman thief he portrayed on screen here, but who, having lost a leg in World War I and then so mastered the use of a prosthetic limb the resulting limp was barely apparent, also possessed the mettle to convincingly depict a master criminal.
When the movie opens, we see the thief's escape, his silhouette leaping over the balcony of a ritzy Venetian hotel while his victim lays unconscious on the floor, an example of the indirect and innovative way Lubitsch preferred to stage action—rather than show us the crime itself, Lubitsch leaves us to fill in the blanks and instead moves us directly into the relationship that will define the rest of the movie.
We get our first good look at Gaston a short distance from the scene of his crime as he instructs a waiter on the preparation of a romantic dinner:
"It must be the most marvelous supper. We may not eat it, but it must be marvelous."
"Yes, Baron."
"And waiter?"
"Yes, Baron?"
"You see that moon?"
"Yes, Baron."
"I want to see that moon in the champagne."
"Yes, Baron." (makes note on pad) "'Moon in champagne.'"
"I want to see—um—"
"Yes, Baron."
"And as for you, waiter—"
"Yes, Baron?"
"I don't want to see you at all."
Gaston is pretending to be a baron so he can scam a countess, who ironically turns out to be Lily pretending to be a countess so she can scam a baron. As Lily, Lubitsch cast Miriam Hopkins, who had worked with the director a year earlier in the musical comedy, The Smiling Lieutenant (she would work with him again in 1933's Design For Living). As I have written before (here), "Hopkins was one of the sauciest actresses of the pre-Code age, excelling in light comedies and lurid melodramas alike," yet because her best films often proved too scandalous to be re-issued once censors began taking scissors to Hollywood's past, "even film fanatics can admit to having rarely seen her work."
It doesn't take long for Gaston and Lily to realize the truth about each other, but rather than being angry or disappointed, the two are titillated, and dinner turns into a virtual striptease of items they've stolen from each other—a wallet, a brooch, a pocket watch—climaxing with the revelation of the most audacious theft of all:
"I hope you don't mind if I keep your garter."
"Darling!"
The film quickly jumps ahead a year—no wasted motion for Lubitsch. Gaston and Lily have been living together and thieving together through the capitals of Europe and all is well until they run across a wealthy young widow. Madame Colet is rich, generous and bored with the stiffs who court her—veteran farceurs, Charlie Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton (the latter the very man Gaston robbed in Venice). When Gaston appears at her door as part of a scheme to separate her from her fortune, she sees in him the sort of handsome, Continental man she's been longing for.
"Madame Colet, if I were your father—which fortunately I am not—and you made any attempt to handle your own business affairs, I would give you a good spanking. In a business way, of course."
"What would you do if you were my secretary?"
"The same thing."
"You're hired."
The widow, who may well know she's being taken but is still eager for the ride, is played with sympathy and sex appeal by Kay Francis. Her polished, dark beauty contrasts nicely with Hopkins's earthy blonde charms and no doubt was a factor in her casting, as was her performance earlier that year in Jewel Robbery, in which she plays a willing victim to William Powell's elegant jewel thief. Although her career would later take a nose-dive after a bitter contract dispute at Warner Brothers, in 1932, she was at the peak of her popularity.
Just the plot I've described so far would provide the makings of a good comedy (or spun in a different direction, suspense thriller), but Lubitsch ups the ante by creating genuine chemistry between Gaston and the widow. Suddenly Trouble In Paradise is no longer a simple story about the theft of money, but the theft of Gaston's affections as well, which realistically can't end well for somebody. The inevitable heartbreak adds what Andrew Sarris called "a counterpoint of poignant sadness during a film's gayest moments," and is what, I think, lifts this sparkling comedy to the level of pure genius.
And that's without even addressing the numerous examples of Lubitsch's mastery of the technical end of his craft, which not only keeps the story moving but gives this confection its airy, art Deco style. "I think I have done nothing better or as good," he wrote of the film shortly before his death.
"The plot is grown-up, funny and sad," Roger Ebert wrote in 2002, and for his review of the film for his Great Movies series, he added, "in a drawing room comedy of froth and inconsequence, you find that you believe in the characters and care about them."
The result was a hit with audiences and the film landed in the list of the year's top ten money makers despite mixed reviews from the critics. Despite its success, relatively rare for Lubitsch, the film was withdrawn from circulation once the studios began enforcing the Production Code in 1934 and was not seen again until 1968. Coupled with the fact that it was never released on videotape and didn't land on DVD until 2003, Trouble In Paradise probably ranks high on a list of least-seen essential classics.
In 1991, the Library of Congress selected Trouble In Paradise for preservation in the National Film Registry.
[To read Part Four of this essay, click here.]
You know, every once in a while you're faced with something so perfect—the Sistine Chapel, Secretariat at the Belmont, John Lennon's vocal on "Twist and Shout"—you can actually hear the music of the spheres as they move through the eternal ether.
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