Nic Cage As Everyone ...

I hope you guys have stopped off at Nic Cage As Everyone. Uncle Willie is doing some weird and wonderful things in the kitchen.

I don't have the technical chops to take part—I'd love to see Nic Cage as Louise Brooks or Joan Blondell. Ah well, something to think about ...

African American History Month

KC over at Classic Movies reminds me that February is African American History Month. As I've written before, images of African Americans in movies were few and far between during the first half of the 20th century, usually limited to small supporting roles as domestics, Pullman porters or racist stereotypes so broadly drawn, they shock the conscience of a modern-day viewer.

And while there's definitely something to Hattie McDaniel's assertion that she'd "rather play a maid than be one," every now and then a performer appeared on screen in a role just tasty enough to make you hunger for what might have been.

Here are a half dozen who made a splash during the early sound era:

Nina Mae McKinney

Ethel Waters

Bill "Bojangles" Robinson

Louise Beavers

Paul Robeson

Hattie McDaniel

Poll Results: Bringing Up Baby Is Your Favorite Howard Hawks Movie Of The 1930s

Poll numbers don't lie. Bringing Up Baby is your favorite Howard Hawks movie of the 1930s, even if it isn't.

My good pal and movie mentor, bellotoot, called this one a week ago when he wrote "Bringing Up Baby going away. Scarface and Only Angels Have Wings, pick 'em. Twentieth Century trails the pack." And indeed, the final numbers were 11 votes for Baby, 6 each for Scarface and Angels and 1 for Twentieth Century. Bellotoot, who has a Chaplin poster on his wall and a "Rufus T. Firefly" nameplate on his desk, proves once again that when it comes to movies, he is the master and the Monkey his humble servant.

Thirty-One Days Of Oscar

Turner Classic Movies begins "31 Days Of Oscar" today, its annual month-long film festival leading up to the year's Academy award ceremony.

TCM is showing several movies that I've mentioned here at the Monkey. If you get TCM on your cable system, check them out. As always times are for the east coast of the United States.

Wednesday, February 3
7:15 AM The Champ
10:45 AM The Public Enemy

Thursday, February 4
4:30 AM Disraeli

Friday, February 12
5:30 AM Little Caesar
10:30 AM Our Dancing Daughters

Monday, February 15
9:15 AM Smart Money

Tuesday, February 16
2 PM Grand Hotel
4 PM Emma
5:15 PM The Sin Of Madelon Claudet
6:30 PM The Racket

Thursday, February 18
8:45 AM Five Star Final
8 PM The Crowd
9:45 PM A Free Soul

Monday, February 22
12:15 PM The Divorcee
2 PM The Broadway Melody

Tuesday, February 23
9:45 PM One Hour With You

Sunday, February 28
5:15 AM Smilin' Through

Special Katie Award For Cinematography: Lee Garmes (Shanghai Express and Scarface)

I've mentioned before that this blog had its start in a project to choose alternate Oscars for every award category dating back to Oscar's beginning, a project that after seventeen years became more of a hindrance than a help to my understanding of movies and their history. Last March, I pared the list down to seven categories—picture, director, a single, combined screenplay award, and the four acting categories—and I've been writing essays about the winners ever since.

Lost in the shuffle though were some key figures in the making of films and their history—cinematographers, film editors and composers, among others. From time to time, I'll hand out special Katie Awards to rectify the oversight. Today, I want to mention Lee Garmes, who had a spectacular year in 1932, lighting and photographing two of the year's best movies, Shanghai Express and Scarface, as well as two Norma Shearer vehicles—Smilin' Through and Strange Interlude—and one of Clara Bow's last movies, arguably her best talkie, Call Her Savage.

Scarface you know about if you've been reading this blog. The most violent and stylish of the early gangster movies, Scarface also represented the most fluid and beautifully photographed of Howard Hawks's movies.

Shanghai Express was the fourth of the seven collaborations between actress Marlene Dietrich and director Josef von Sternberg, and like their other efforts, it too includes an exotic location, a woman with a past, a tortured romance and just enough violence to whet the appetite. In this case, the exotic location is China during the early days of its civil war, the fallen woman is a high-priced courtesan named Shanghai Lily, the tortured romance involves a British doctor who left Lily years before when he mistakenly thought she was cheating on him, and the violence comes at the hands of Warner Oland made up to look like the leader of one of the warring factions.

In one sense, the movie is a meditation on the idea that love without faith isn't love at all, just animal instinct; but in fact Shanghai Express—like all the Dietrich-von Sternberg collaborations—is really a meditation on Marlene Dietrich's cheekbones. And indispensable to this rite was the camerawork of Lee Garmes.

Indeed, figuring out how to light Marlene Dietrich—putting the key light above and forward of her for her first Hollywood movie, Morocco, to hollow out her cheekbones and narrow her nose—might have been the most significant lighting choice of Garmes's career. Certainly it had a profound impact on Dietrich's, defining her look so successfully, she insisted on the lighting technique for the rest of her career.

In terms of composition, Garmes preferred deep shadows with highlights on the scene's key elements, and like the painters who influenced him, he like a soft, indirect "northern" light, which gave what others have called a "painterly" effect. He developed his techniques and preferences while working on comedy shorts during the silent era—the productions were so cheap, Garmes couldn't afford lights and shot the films outside, using reflectors to angle the sunlight.

In addition to Scarface and Dietrich's early Hollywood movies, Garmes was also the cinematographer on such films as Nightmare Alley, The Portrait of Jennie, Detective Story and The Desperate Hours. He was nominated for four Oscars and won a well-deserved one for Shanghai Express in 1932. He was also president of the American Society of Cinematographers from 1960 to 1961.

Perhaps the most cele- brated movie he ever worked on was the one he didn't receive credit for. Garmes began as the cinematographer on Gone With The Wind, photographing the burning of Atlanta scene and the scenes directed by George Cukor. He was replaced, however, when Victor Fleming took over the troubled project. Fleming typically liked a sharp, picture-postcard look to his movies; Garmes's soft pastels didn't fit the bill.

And who would have won the Katie Awards for cinematography in previous years?

1927-28: Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)
1928-29: John Arnold (The Wind)
1929-30: Arthur Edeson (All Quiet On The Western Front)
1930-31: Fritz Arno Wagner (M)

I leave it up to you to fill in their biographies. But each now sports a Katie Award for the mantlepiece. Congratulations, fellas.

A Shot Of Jean Harlow—With A Bath Water Chaser

I've only recently learned how to do screen captures, which for most of you would probably be like your mother saying she'd only recently learned how to use the telephone, but which is a real godsend for someone like me blogging about old movies—where else to get a shot of Red Dust's Jean Harlow bathing in the company bath water? Not the sort of picture MGM put on movie posters even if it would have sold a million extra tickets.

Jean Harlow will be one of the nominees for best actress of 1932-33 when we eventually get there (for her performances in Dinner At Eight, Bombshell and the aforementioned Red Dust). No guarantee she'll win—she faces tough competition from Greta Garbo (Queen Christina), Miriam Hopkins (Design For Living and Trouble in Paradise), Katharine Hepburn (Little Women) and I'm not sure who else; it's a very loaded award season, comparable to 1939 if you want my opinion.

But in the meantime, a taste of things to come.

Happy Birthday, Ernst Lubitsch

Maybe the wittiest director ever, gifted with a comic touch so light they named it after him, Ernst Lubitsch directed some of the finest comedies and musicals of the Twenties and Thirties. I've already mentioned four of his movies in this blog—Lady Windermere's Fan, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg, The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant—with at least a half dozen more down the road. Two of those movies, Ninotchka and The Shop Around The Corner, are playing this afternoon on Turner Classic Movies (between 2 and 6, if you live in the Eastern Time Zone).

Since I'll be writing in my usual mind-numbing detail about Lubitsch when he one day pulls in a Katie Award for best director, I won't whack you over the head with him this morning. But if you have a chilled bottle of champagne handy, I'd suggest you pop the cork and drink a toast to the old master. When people say "they don't make 'em like they used to," they're referring to Ernst Lubitsch.

Here's to you, old buddy.

Classics Of Gay Cinema: Mädchen In Uniform

Personally, I hate putting labels on movies. Terms like "chick flick" and "fun-stupid," while useful to lazy critics and unimaginative marketing departments, are more often than not designed to say to the ticket-buying public (or Oscar voters) "it's safe to skip this one." Plus, a label like "gay cinema" creates certain story expectations that, in the case of Mädchen in Uniform at least, have nothing much to do with what's on the screen.

I could just as accurately label Mädchen in Uniform "boarding school cinema" and lump it in with Diary of a Lost Girl and Dead Poets Society. But failing to note that a movie made in 1931 treated the subject of homosexuality with seriousness and sensitivity would be like an archeologist failing to note that he found a television set buried in King Tut's tomb.

Images of gays in the movies of the early sound era were few and far between; and positive ones? Forget it. One of Clara Bow's last films, 1932's Call Her Savage, included a scene in a gay bar, the first and last such scene in a Hollywood movie until Otto Preminger's 1962 movie, Advise and Consent, but otherwise gay men existed at best as foppish creatures of ambiguous sexuality and at worst as "sissies" subject to ridicule and broad comedy.

Lesbians fared a little better—think of Marlene Dietrich kissing a woman in Morocco (1930) or Greta Garbo proclaiming she'd "die a bachelor" in Queen Christina (1933)—but a lesbian relationship was never front and center in a Hollywood movie. More often, Hollywood simply pretended that gays and lesbians didn't exist, for example, turning the lesbian relationship at the heart of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour into the heterosexual triangle of These Three.

That's why seeing a movie like Mädchen in Uniform feels so much like stepping into a time warp—there wouldn't be another movie like it for decades. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that it came from Germany; film critic Ruby Rich in talking about the film, noted that Berlin under the Weimar Republic was remarkably open to gays and lesbians such as Christa Winsloe who wrote both the script and the stage play it was based on, and Leontine Sagan who directed both versions of the story. The movie "comes to us directly from that era," Rich said, "and shows us the kind of scene that flourished there."

Mädchen in Uniform is the story of a fourteen year old orphan girl, Manuela (Hertha Thiele in her film debut), the niece of a wealthy aristocrat who warehouses her at a prestigious boarding school. The school's elderly headmistress (Emilia Unda) is the proud daughter of a Prussian officer and modeling her school on that military tradition, is regimented, authoritarian and cruel.

"Through discipline and hunger we will become great again," she says as she dismisses student complaints of malnutrition and mistreatment, "or not at all!" The movie was filmed just two years before Hitler took power in Germany and the school and its principal were swipes at the rising Nazi tide and its threat to a free society. At this school, books outside the classroom are forbidden, letters are censored and the girls' striped uniforms bear an uncomfortable similarity to those later worn by concentration camp inmates.

Indeed, life at the school is so regimented, the only warmth its students know is a nightly kiss on the forehead bestowed by their favorite teacher, Fraulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck). "Don't fall in love!" one of the girls teases Manuela when she arrives. "All the girls are crazy about Fraulein von Bernburg."

Manuela sees in her teacher a substitute for the mother she lost many years before and as she is overwhelmed by a confusion of emotions—loneliness, homesickness, her own budding sexuality—she develops a crush on Bernburg so palpable her feelings are soon obvious to everyone. Manuela's story, that of a lonely girl searching for something, is the film's strength—loneliness, ironically, being one of the chief traits all human beings share.

Fraulein von Bernburg's feelings are more ambiguous —she expresses concern for Manuela and the girls, displays maternal affection, and yet the first time she lays eyes on Manuela descending a staircase, the look is as frank as Rhett Butler's as he pictures Scarlett O'Hara without her shimmy on. And indeed, the first night, as Bernburg kisses each girl on the forehead, Manuela impulsively throws her arms around her teacher—and Bernburg responds by kissing the girl on the lips.

"What you call sin, Frau Principal," Bernburg says, "I call love which has thousands of forms."

Later, when an act of kindness is misconstrued, the simmering tension between the authoritarian principal and the compassionate teacher comes to a boil.

The film's ending, in stark contrast to that of the play, is hopeful. Whether Winsloe and Sagan settled on the changes for artistic reasons or to appease German censors, I can't say, but at least, as Ruby Rich put it, they spared us the cliche of "lesbian suicide."

The film also spares us the cliche (or is it the reality?) of Mean Girls-style conflict between the students. The girls here are refreshingly supportive of one another and rather than turning on each other in the face of oppression, they rally together. Indeed, they are seen as Germany's greatest hope to avoid the coming disaster. In light of what soon after transpired in Germany, however, the filmmakers' optimism proved to be nothing more than wishful thinking.

Mädchen in Uniform premiered in Germany on November 27, 1931. It was initially banned in the United States until Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of New York governor Franklin Roosevelt, interceded on its behalf and in September 1932, it played briefly in New York City. While audiences of the time—and certainly censors—were shocked at the film's subject matter, I'm not sure a modern audience would react any differently today. While we may now be open to the characters' sexual orientation, I suspect most of us would look askance at the hints of pedophilia, an issue the filmmakers seemed blind to.

As with every other director of quality in Germany in the early Thirties, there was no place for director Leontine Sagan in Hitler's new regime. Unlike the case of directors such as Fritz Lang (whose own M would make an interesting double feature with Mädchen in Uniform), there was no room for Sagan in Hollywood either. She directed only two more movies, both for Alexander Korda in England, then moved to South Africa where she founded the National Theater of Johannesburg.

Playwright and screenwriter Christa Winsloe also left Germany when the Nazis took power and joined the French Resistance during the war. On June 10, 1944, four Frenchmen mistook her for a spy and shot her; they were later acquitted of her murder.

Dorothea Wieck made a couple of Hollywood films, neither a success, then returned to Germany where she continued to work in supporting roles for another forty years. Hertha Thiele resisted offers by the Nazi party to perform in propaganda films and in 1937 emigrated to Switzerland where it took her five years to find work. After the war, she worked in East Germany as a nursing assistant before returning to acting in the mid-1960s.

As for the subject matter itself, with enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, portrayals of gays and lesbians were driven even further underground. Gays and lesbians would have to be satisfied with the occasional Mrs. Danvers or Joel Cairo, characters ambiguous enough to slip past the censors, if not audiences. Not for another thirty years would Hollywood again openly address the issue.

Postscript: Unfortunately, Mädchen in Uniform is not available on DVD. It pops up periodically on cable (I taped it off the Sundance Channel years ago), or if you don't mind watching it on YouTube, you can see it here.

The Nominees For Best Supporting Actress, 1931-32

Joan Crawford (Grand Hotel)

Ann Dvorak (Scarface)

Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant and Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde)

Anna May Wong (Shanghai Express)

Vote In The New Poll

Of these 1930s-era Howard Hawks movies, which do you like best?

Scarface

Twentieth Century

Bringing Up Baby

Only Angels Have Wings


Remember, there are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.