"That's Typing" Tuesday, in which I share unpolished, unpublished writings from my vast store of unpolished, unpublished writings. On Tuesdays.
This, from my notes on The Sound of Music:
The Academy's choice for best picture of 1965, The Sound of Music, is not the worst movie to ever win the Oscar for best picture, but thanks to the weakness of its potential competition, it may be the worst movie to nevertheless deserve to win for best picture.
... Dramatically, the movie is the story of Maria's search for her purpose in life, and that story reaches its perfect conclusion with her marriage while the nuns reprise the song "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?" Really, a perfect ending to a great little musical/romantic comedy. And then it's like somebody ran into the editing room and said, "Oh, hell, we're thirty minutes short, can you tack on some Nazis?"
I realize, of course, that Maria's escape from the Nazis was the real-life incident that inspired the story in the first place, but the fact is, the writers never figured out how to integrate the politics and the love story, and so they distill out like oil and water into two separate movies, with one storyline poking its head in from time to time to nod hello to the other, until by the end, they break apart altogether.
And then there's the acting.
The kids are fine, I guess—Kym Karath, who got her finger caught in Friedrich's teeth, is adorable—but Richard Haydn and Ben Wright (Max and Herr Zoeller, respectively) play their parts like refugees from a rejected episode of Hogan's Heroes, while Eleanor Parker and Christopher Plummer—well, how can I put this: I love Parker's early work and I think Plummer's later work was sublime, but here they meet in the middle of their careers and frankly, they're just awful.
Plummer as Captain von Trapp is so coy in his scenes with Julie Andrews, he comes across not like a grieving widower stunned to find himself suddenly raising seven children alone but more like a bewildered teenage virgin who has no idea where those children came from in the first place. Did the late Madame von Trapp find them under a cabbage leaf (or perhaps a sprig of edelweiss)? Watching Plummer fumble his way through his seduction of Julie Andrews, you might think so.
As for Eleanor Parker, who was very good in such movies as Caged and The Naked Jungle, she plays the Baroness like she's auditioning for the part of Cruella de Ville in a Walt Disney cartoon. This was Parker on the way down—it's all Love Boat and Fantasy Island from here on out—and if you remember and care about her work in the Fifties, it's painful to watch.
And yet Julie Andrews is sublime. It might be the best performance by an actress in a musical ever. At least I can't think of a better one. Ginger Rogers was indispensable to Top Hat and Swing Time, certainly; Judy Garland was a dynamo until drug addiction caught up with her; and Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe are a wonderful team in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But better?
In any event, The Sound Of Music rides on Julie Andrews's shoulders. She supplies all the energy, all the emotion, all the truth, and when she's not on screen, the movie turns sluggish, and drowns in its own insincerity.
Next Tuesday: random notes about Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day.
Our greatest living national treasure, Don Rickles, is 85 today.
Mister Muleboy, bellotoot and myself drive up to Atlantic City a couple of times a year to see him. We've all been insulted by him from time to time, but I must modestly confess, of the three of us, I have been hammered the most. I think I exude calm normalcy—the choice of Harold Lloyd as my avatar was carefully considered—and he instinctively knows I won't try to upstage him.
Ah, good times.
It's safe to say, Rickles is not for everybody. But he is for me, and I love the guy. He also has a significant presence in the movies, with Run Silent, Run Deep, Kelly's Heroes, Casino and, of course, as the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the Toy Story trilogy.
My big brother reminded me last night that today is National Train Day. "What are you doing to celebrate?" he asked. A very reasonable question.
Well, for one thing I'm going to re-watch Buster Keaton's classic train movie, The General.
Have you seen The General? If not, you really should.
"Not only is it one of the greatest comedies ever made," I once wrote, "The General, which Buster Keaton wrote, directed and starred in, is also an action film that puts most of its modern counterparts to shame. Based on an incident from the American Civil War, the story—about a lovelorn engineer who finds himself battling spies who hijack his train—features a spectacular chase involving two, then three speeding locomotives, daredevil stunts, explosions, burning bridges, comic mishaps, sight gags, split-second timing, all while Keaton woos the girl. Keaton's famously understated reaction to the chaos around him—he was known as 'The Great Stoneface'—only adds to the modern feel of the production."
The latest meme making its way around the blog-o-sphere are haiku reviews of favorite movies. A haiku, for those of you not versed in Japanese poetry, is a seventeen syllable poem juxtaposing two ideas, usually, though not always, broken into three lines of five, seven and five syllables. Done right, a haiku should put you in mind of wind chimes in a shady garden as a yellow jacket stings your knee.
Actually, "wind chimes in a shady garden as a yellow jacket stings your knee" is itself something of a haiku, now that I think about it. As is "we'll always have Van Tiffen and Legion Field—here's looking at you, kick" which my little brother wrote about the 1985 Auburn-Alabama game and the pain of losing. I'd say other than that sunburn I got at a Vanderbilt game once, it was the most painful sporting event I've ever attended..
Anyway, here is my own meager contribution, a haiku review of the Mythical Monkey itself:
one monkey typing forty-five minutes—oh, lord, another film blog
Well, whaddya want for nothing—Shakespeare?
Coming soon: My review of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance. In many more than seventeen syllables.
[A reprint of a post I wrote previously about Jackie Cooper, who passed away on Tuesday.]
Between Jackie Coogan's turn in Charlie Chaplin's 1921 comedy classic, The Kid, and the advent of box office phenomenon Shirley Temple in the early 1930s, no child star was bigger or better than "America's Boy," Jackie Cooper.
Born in 1922, Cooper broke into movies at the age of seven, working in the Our Gang comedies at the Hal Roach Studios for $50 a week. Cooper became a star just two years later when he landed the lead role in Skippy, a film version of the day's most famous comic strip. (So popular was the strip, in fact, that Skippy brand peanut butter was named for it—or was it? Strip creator Percy Crosby filed suit and won a decision in the U.S. Patent Court, yet seventy-six years later, Skippy is still my peanut butter of choice.)
Skippy—the movie not the peanut butter—was the one where Cooper's uncle, director Norman Taurog, famously threatened to shoot Cooper's dog if the boy didn't cry on cue, then sent a production assistant outside with a gun loaded with blanks. Cooper heard the shot and predictably cried buckets. Only nine years old at the time, he's still the youngest actor to be nominated for an Oscar in a lead role.
Like most of us, he slept through the ceremony, although in his case, in Oscar-winner Marie Dressler's lap. "I was much more interested in not having to go to school that day than I was in the ceremony," he later admitted.
Cooper was even better a year later in the award-winning boxing movie, The Champ. Directed by King Vidor, The Champ is an unabashed tearjerker of the first water and turned Cooper and co-star Wallace Beery into the unlikeliest of screen teams. The pair made four feature-length movies together between 1931 and 1935.
Beery won an Oscar playing an alcoholic, over-the- hill boxer with delusions of grandeur, the kind of guy who wins a horse for his son in a crap game, then promptly loses it back again—twice! When he's not gambling, he's hungover in a fleabag hotel room over a saloon, haunted by what might have been and fueled by pipe dreams of another shot at the title. Cooper is the champ's son, who even at nine years of age is a classic enabler. He adores his father but has been disappointed too many times to lie to himself anymore, even as he lies to the Champ.
Cooper more than holds his own in his scenes with the more experienced Beery, for example, in an early scene when fight promoters call his father a drunk and a "palooka." Eyes glistening with a mixture of rage, disappointment and humiliation, Cooper holds his defiant pose for a moment, then his shoulders slump and he turns away.
"You don't believe what they said about me being drunk the night I lost the championship, do ya, Dink."
"No," says Cooper, slump shouldered, not looking at his father, and starting to clean up after him like he always does.
It's a formula that has served Hollywood well, right up to and including Mickey Rourke's 2008 comeback in The Wrestler, and won Frances Marion an Oscar for the screenplay, her second.
Cooper himself was rather dismissive of most of his early screen roles. "Very often on some of this stuff when I'd have to go to work. I'd just give the script a cursory glance. I had no training, and I was a quick study, so nobody knew how involved or not involved I was. But I look at that stuff now and I can see I wasn't involved, and I wasn't very good."
Cooper and Beery made three more films together, including Treasure Island. "They kept me in short pants as long as they could," Cooper said of his days as a child actor, "until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph."
Ironically, because of his own experiences, Cooper grew up opposed to children working full-time as actors. "No amount of rationalization, no excuses, can make up for what a kid loses—what I lost—when a normal childhood is abandoned for a movie career.
His 1981 autobiography was entitled Please Don't Shoot My Dog.
Cooper left Hollywood during World War II, serving in the United States Navy where he attained the rank of Captain. After the war, the transition from child star to adult performer was difficult for Cooper, but he eventually wound up in television, both as an actor and as a director. As the latter, he won two Emmys for directing episodes of MASH (one of the funny ones) and The White Shadow. Maybe his most famous movie role after childhood was that of Daily Planet editor Perry White in four Superman movies between 1978 and 1987.
Cooper retired in 1989. He has four children and lives in California.
Forget auteur theory, formalism, genre studies or any of that other film school claptrap, the unifying thread running through any well-rounded and not so well-rounded film education is Oscar trivia. People who wouldn't know Follow Focus from the French New Wave can tell you every Oscar winner from the first ceremony to the present day; fanatics have known for years that Citizen Kane should have won best picture of 1941; and even the most casual filmgoers will fight ninety-nine rounds over the latest Oscar snub.
But when it comes to movies made before the Oscars were invented, well, for most of us, they might as well have never been made at all.
And why? Because we like a winner and even more, we like crabbing about our favorite loser. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn't start handing out awards until 1929, and no movie made before August 1, 1927, was eligible. If the Academy had come up with the Oscars in, say, 1924, we'd all have an opinion about whether Greed should have won best picture over Sherlock Jr. or The Thief of Bagdad. But the Academy didn't and even lifelong film buffs will cheerfully shrug and admit they've never seen any of those pictures, much less have an opinion about them.
Without winners and losers, there's no controversy—and in America, at least, no controversy means nothing to talk about. I tell you, silent movies will never be as popular as they ought to be until we have something to argue about.
So I'm starting the argument, here, now.
The "Silent Oscars" are my choices for best picture, director, screenplay and all four acting categories for the years before the Academy began handing out awards, beginning with 1915 and running through July 31, 1927. I might get every single pick wrong, but you've got start somewhere—and besides, based on past history, getting it wrong is what the Oscars are all about.
Let the argument begin.
PICTURE winner:Les Vampires (prod. Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont) nominees:The Birth Of A Nation (prod. D.W. Griffith); The Cheat (prod. Cecil B. DeMille); The Italian (prod. Thomas H. Ince); Regeneration (prod. William Fox) Must-See Movies:The Birth Of A Nation; Les Vampires Recommended Films:Assunta Spina;The Cheat; Fatty's Tintype Tangle; His New Job; The Italian; Posle Smerti a.k.a. After Death; Regeneration; The Tramp Of Interest:Alice in Wonderland; The Coward; A Fool There Was ACTOR winner: George Beban (The Italian) nominees: Roscoe Arbuckle (The Keystone Comedies); Charles Chaplin (The Essanay Comedies) ACTRESS winner: Francesca Bertini (Assunta Spina and La signora delle camelie) nominees: Theda Bara (A Fool There Was); Geraldine Farrar (Carmen) DIRECTOR winner: Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires) nominees: D.W. Griffith (The Birth of a Nation); Raoul Walsh (Regeneration) SUPPORTING ACTOR winner: Sessue Hayakawa (The Cheat) nominees: Marcel Lévesque (Les Vampires); Henry B. Walthall (The Birth of a Nation) SUPPORTING ACTRESS winner: Musidora (Les Vampires) nominees: Anna Q. Nilsson (Regeneration); Clara Williams (The Italian) SCREENPLAY winner: Raoul Walsh and Walter C. Hackett, from the autobiography My Mamie Rose by Owen Frawley Kildare (Regeneration) nominees: Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires); Thomas H. Ince and C. Gardner Sullivan (The Italian) SPECIAL AWARDS: G.W. "Billy" Bitzer (The Birth Of A Nation) (Cinematography); D.W. Griffith, Joseph Henabery, James Smith, Rose Smith and Raoul Walsh (The Birth Of A Nation) (Film Editing); Robert Goldstein and Clare West (The Birth Of A Nation) (Costumes); Frank Wortman (The Birth Of A Nation) (Set Design)
Boy, what an obscure bunch of winners, you're no doubt thinking, and I agree with you. Two years ago, I doubt I had heard of any of them except Sessue Hayakawa and Raoul Walsh—the former you may remember for his Oscar-nominated performance as the commandant of the Japanese POW camp in The Bridge on the River Kwai, the latter for directing such films as White Heat and The Roaring Twenties. The rest of them? Not a chance.
But let's face it, other than Charlie Chaplin, The Birth of a Nation and maybe Theda Bara, all of 1915's potential choices are pretty obscure.
If the Silent Oscars were simply about trying to predict what the Academy might have chosen in 1915, then The Birth of a Nation would be the big winner, taking home awards for best picture, director, cinematography, editing, set design, costumes and acting awards for Lillian Gish and maybe Henry B. Walthall, making it the early silent era's equivalent of Gone With The Wind, which cleaned up at the Oscars a quarter of a century later.
But that's not quite what the Silent Oscars are all about. Aside from the fact that the Academy wasn't founded until 1927, its rather conventional wisdom is wrong more often than it's right. The Academy over the years has shown a real prejudice against comedies, commercial flops, foreign films and "mere" entertainment—which explains why Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock never won competitive Oscars—and there's no reason to think it would have done any better just because the films were silent.
The Birth of a Nation, the story of two families torn apart by the American Civil War and its aftermath, has some extraordinary sequences, particularly the battle scenes and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but ultimately director D.W. Griffith's heedless devotion to the historical myths underlying the movie's source material—an unapologetically racist novel called The Clansman—renders the movie nearly unwatchable to a modern audience.
Even the most charitable reading of the movie, that it is a Faulkneresque tragedy about American apartheid told through the eyes of a triumphant white supremacist, can't explain away the tedious romance that dominates the film's second half. For all its importance to film history—its box office success pretty much guaranteed the future of the motion picture—The Birth of a Nation is a deeply-flawed, would-be masterpiece. (Read more about it here.)
Besides, just because you may not have heard of my choices doesn't mean that an audience in 1915 wouldn't have. Les Vampires was a huge hit in France, Francesca Bertini was Italy's most famous actress during the silent era, The Cheat and Regeneration were big hits in the U.S., and while The Italian flopped at the box office, it proved to be a major influence on directors of the time, with specific shots echoed in such films as The Immigrant, 7th Heaven and The Cameraman.
My choice for best picture, Les Vampires, you're familiar with, if only because I wrote 2000 words about it (here) last week. The ten-part, seven hour serial written and directed by Louis Feuillade tells the story of a criminal organization, The Vampires, that terrorizes Belle Époque Paris, corrupting those it can, murdering those it can't. Feuillade's serials, which both glamorized crime and anticipated the anxieties that came to define the 20th century—violence, paranoia, alienation, conspiracy, terrorism— influenced directors as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock.
"All the roots of the thriller and suspense genres," David Thomson has written, "are in Feuillade's sense that evil, anarchy and destructiveness speak to the frustrations banked up in modern society."
Although she doesn't show up until the serial's third chapter, Musidora as the sinister, seductive Irma Vep is the real star of the show, robbing, murdering and kidnapping her way into the hearts of a generation of Frenchmen. The surrealists worshiped her amoral sexuality," Tom Gunning wrote, "and the revolutionary poet Louis Aragon later claimed that Irma Vep's dark bodysuit inspired the youth of France with fantasies of rebellion."
Musidora also starred in Feuillade's next serial, Judex, and later produced and directed her own films.
The serial has a wonderfully nutty quality, showing us a simultanously whimsical and dangerous Paris where you can lean out a second-story window and wind up with a lasso around your neck, where every cupboard hides a body, every hatbox a head, and your neighbor's loft conceals a cannon. "[T]he orginality of Lang and Hitchcock" (Thomson again) "fall into place when one has seen Feuillade: Mabuse is the disciple of Fantômas; while Hitchcock's persistent faith in the man who wears high heels, in the crop-spraying plane that will swoop down to kill, and in a world mined for the complacent is inherited from Feuillade."
Simply put, despite being a product of the early silent era, Les Vampires more than any other work from the first thirty years of film history (1888-1918) feels like it was written for a 21st century audience and is my choice for best picture of 1915.
Francesca Bertini, my choice as 1915's best actress in a leading role, was Italy's first great star and inspired one of the two significant genres that characterized silent Italian cinema, the "diva" film. Similar to Hollywood's film noir of the post-war era, diva films told tales of beautiful, aristocratic women who destroy men as a sort of bloodsport.
In Assunta Spina, Bertini's seemingly trivial attempt to provoke her fiance to jealousy leads to a brutal beating, and her seduction of a corrupt judge to secure preferential treatment for her imprisoned fiance leads to disaster. Rather than playing a cartoonish vamp, however, Bertini's characterization is heartbreakingly three dimensional.
Likewise, her performance in La signora delle camelie, an early adaptation of the Dumas novel Camille, is both intimate and deeply-felt, and the anguish she conveys as she juggles true love, tuberculosis and the demands of her crass profession, rivals anything the great Greta Garbo managed in the 1936 version of the same story.
In her essay "Naturalism and the Diva: Francesca Bertini in Assunta Spina," Lea Jacobs argues that Bertini's "pictorial" style of acting—the broad, stylized gestures that modern audiences find so off-putting—is not so much representational as akin to a dance, with a rhythm and use of space reminiscent of Sarah Bernhardt. "An appreciation of this kind of acting," she writes, "involves not only an attention to the grace and aptness of the gestures employed, but also, how they mobilize the space of the set and exhaust the range of emotional possibilities of the situation. Rather than being 'read' for their meaning, they should be savored like a jazz musician's improvisations on a well known theme."
(The other Italian genre was the "Maciste" film, named for the heroic strongman at the center of Giovanni Pastrone's 1914 classic, Cabiria. Also known as "swords and sandals" cinema, the Maciste films focused on Italy's glorious past, a subject of particular interest at a time when the unified nation of Italy was only fifty-five years old and still groping for a national identity. After the debacle of World War I, Mussolini and his fascist supporters rode a wave of "strongman" sentiment to power.)
You might also want to check out Theda Bara in A Fool There Was. Bara was one of Hollywood biggest stars during this era, playing the original "vamp," a seducer and destroyer of men (in real life, she was a devoted wife and ardent feminist). The story of woman who seduces a married man and slowly destroys him, A Fool There Was serves as a reminder of just how long the plot of Fatal Attraction has been kicking around—since the Garden of Eden, I'm thinking.
Unfortunately, this Victorian morality tale doesn't answer the question of whether Bara's fame was based on talent or the notoriety of the roles she played. Nearly everything else she ever did, including her triumph, 1917's Cleopatra, was destroyed in a studio fire in 1937, so this is pretty much all you get. (Dawn at Noir and Chick Flicks posted a nice review of A Fool There Was yesterday. Check it out here.)
The best performance by an actor in 1915 was given by Sessue Hayakawa. The Cheat, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, is the story of a rich, spoiled housewife (Fanny Ward) whose profligate spending is driving her husband to financial ruin. Rather than give up her lavish lifestyle, she embezzles a charity's funds then turns to an Asian businessman (Hayakawa) for an emergency loan. Long on the receiving end of Ward's flirtatious attentions, and impatient to consummate their emotional affair, Hayakawa gives her the money but insists she sleep with him in lieu of payment.
When she takes the money but reneges on her end of the bargain, Hayakawa brands her flesh with a heated iron—one of the most startling scenes of this or any other era.
Like Francesca Bertini, however, Hayakawa elevated this potentially trashy material with a terrific performance.
At a time when The Birth of a Nation could play on Americans' fears of interracial sex to sell $16 million worth of tickets, DeMille no doubt intended the explicit attraction between Hayakawa and Ward as a means to provoke the xenophobic passions of his audience. But Hayakawa brings such elegance and subtlety to the role that, prior to his brutal act of violence, a modern audience is likely to find him the only sympathetic character on the screen.
The years before the United States' entry into World War I represented a brief moment of acceptance for Asians in the American film industry and with the box office success of The Cheat, Hayakawa became a major star. Later, he and his wife, actress Tsuru Aoki, formed their own production company and made several films together, most of which are now lost.
Rising anti-Asian sentiment in the early 1920s, however, put an end to Hayakawa's Hollywood career. After failing to find work in his native Japan, Hayakawa moved to France and launched a second film career. After World War II, he returned to Hollywood and earned an Oscar nomination for his supporting performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai.
An even bigger sensation at the box office was Raoul Walsh's film of crime and redemp- tion, Regeneration. Based on Owen Kildare's autobiography My Mamie Rose, Regeneration is the story of a small-time hood who meets a social worker and fights to go straight. The film is even-handed in its portrayal of Kildare, showing his suffering as a child at the hands of abusive stepparents, but not flinching from his crimes as an adult.
Walsh must have liked the basic story—a violent man goes potty over a dame—because he directed variations of it for the rest of his career, including High Sierra and The Strawberry Blonde.
Walsh filmed most of Regeneration on location in New York's slums and saloons, lending the film a documentary feel. His real coup, though, was the casting of veteran actress Anna Q. Nilsson, whom Walsh later accurately described as "ravishing." (You may remember her, along with Buster Keaton and H.B. Warner, as one of the "waxworks" who plays bridge with Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.)
With the Progressive politics of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in full flower, films with a social message were almost a cliche during this era. In addition to Regeneration, you might also check out A Corner in Wheat (1909), Traffic in Souls (1913), Where Are My Children? (1916) and the last film I'll mention in this post, Thomas H. Ince's The Italian, all of which are preserved in the National Film Registry.
While my other choices for the best films and perform- ances of 1915 are obscure by the standards of today, my choice for best actor in a lead role, George Beban in The Italian, is obscure by any standard. Although the film has been deemed worthy for inclusion in the Film Registry, it was not a box office success in 1915 and Beban himself appeared in only twenty films during his career. Still, it's one of the best films and best performances of the year and worth the effort to track down.
The Italian was one of several films about immigrants to emerge from this period of history, an issue understandably of interest to audiences since immigration from Europe to the U.S. had recently reached its peak of more than a million persons a year, with more than 13.5 million first-generation immigrants living in the U.S. The story of an immigrant who arrives in New York with the American Dream of prosperity and upward mobility in his heart only to find poverty, crime and disillusionment must have been a familiar one.
Despite a successful career on Broadway—Beban was able to command a salary of $7000 and percentage of the profits—The Italian was his first film and it takes him a few scenes to find his legs. In fact, I got the sense while watching the film that most everybody was learning on the job—and maybe they were—but by the time the film kicks into gear, with Beban's Beppo Donnetti traveling steerage from Italy to New York, Beban is in complete command of his craft.
"The actor's style is boisterous but grounded in psychological truth," wrote Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy. "He is also an astute judge of his audience. He knows when to appeal to viewers' sympathies and when to pull back, something that could not always be said about his contemporaries."
Beban's descent into despair as his child falls ill and then his icy rage at the politician who used him then spit him out in his hour of need is moving, and his planned revenge chilling—a terrific performance in a small, but unforgettable movie.
Even More Trivia: Lastly I want to mention Frank Keenan who played a supporting role as the father in another highly-touted movie, The Coward. Keenan isn't good in this or any other movie but I bring him up because in my researches I discovered that in his day he was known as a "furniture actor," which turns out to be an old theater term meaning an actor who habitually turns up for work drunk and has to lean on the furniture to keep from falling down
I was chatting this last weekend with Thingy over at Pondering Life—she says she's hit a bit of a dry spell recently, blog-wise (not so's you'd notice, but I'll take her word for it), and she got to wondering what other bloggers do, whether they bank up a supply of future posts to dip into or just ride out the storm.
Me, I type up notes on movies as I think of them, but I never polish anything in advance, which is why I tend to break those long essays into six parts—otherwise, I'd wind up posting once a month. The problem for me is I have some 50,000 words worth of notes (more than a hundred typed pages) that I'm unlikely ever to get to, fragments about Hitchcock, Capra, Cary Grant, etc.
So Thingy suggested that once a week I post one of these random, unpolished fragments. Okay, I will. We'll call it "That's Typing Tuesday," from Truman Capote's famous quote—"That's not writing, that's typing"—about the novel On The Road. Which may not have been a fair reading of Jack Kerouac but is certainly a fair description of what I'll be offering up—not only future movie posts, but poems, fiction, grocery lists, what have you.
I tend to think in phrases and ellipses, which I later fill in with something we like to call grammar. Grammar will not be much in evidence here on Tuesdays. Neither will tact, which I insert along with the grammar. These are unedited thoughts transferred directly from my frontal lobes to my word processor and now to my blog. Don't choke on it.
To give you a taste of what's to come, here are the four fragments I shared with Thingy on her blog:
Cary Grant (North By Northwest) ad man ... expedient lie—thinks it's amusing ... floats above life, untouched by it ... "rot" ... Roger O. Thornhill— "O" for "nothing" ... the CIA (or is it the FBI? "We're all part of the same alphabet soup.") teaches him the hard way the real consequences of the "expedient" lie ... and thus underneath all the movement and brilliant action sequences is the story of a man discovering he actually gives a damn ...
The Apartment ... I've read some complaints that the happy ending is contrived and tacked on, to which I say if you want to see a man sell his soul for a career in mid-level management, don't bother buying a theater ticket, just go to the office on Monday. There are millions of those guys walking around, and some of them are selling their souls for a whole lot less than a corner office with three windows. Movies—the ones we remember beyond a single award season—get made about the one in a million guy, whoever he is, and that's as it should be.
Psycho And The Problem Of Endings I think Hitchcock was reacting to the critical and commercial drubbing Vertigo took ... "You want me to spell it out for you?" he seems to be saying, "I'll spell it out until you're begging me to stop" ... and he just keeps going and going, belaboring the issue long past the point where we care, and then he goes some more, just so Alfred Hitchcock can give his audience the finger.
It's the one significant flaw in an otherwise perfect movie ... Psycho Norman has mother issues. Well, don't we all. At least he can keep his in the fruit cellar.
In the future, you'll get one fragment. One fragment only, Vasili.
Next Tuesday: The Sound of Music
Postscript: I finished the final part of my essay about the films of 1915 last night, but too late to post it. I guess I could have posted it this morning, but you can't very well start a series called "That's Typing Tuesday" on Wednesday. So the 1915 essay gets pushed back, to either this afternoon or tomorrow morning.
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.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
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?
This, from my notes on The Sound of Music:
And then there's the acting.
Plummer as Captain von Trapp is so coy in his scenes with Julie Andrews, he comes across not like a grieving widower stunned to find himself suddenly raising seven children alone but more like a bewildered teenage virgin who has no idea where those children came from in the first place. Did the late Madame von Trapp find them under a cabbage leaf (or perhaps a sprig of edelweiss)? Watching Plummer fumble his way through his seduction of Julie Andrews, you might think so.
As for Eleanor Parker, who was very good in such movies as Caged and The Naked Jungle, she plays the Baroness like she's auditioning for the part of Cruella de Ville in a Walt Disney cartoon. This was Parker on the way down—it's all Love Boat and Fantasy Island from here on out—and if you remember and care about her work in the Fifties, it's painful to watch.
And yet Julie Andrews is sublime. It might be the best performance by an actress in a musical ever. At least I can't think of a better one. Ginger Rogers was indispensable to Top Hat and Swing Time, certainly; Judy Garland was a dynamo until drug addiction caught up with her; and Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe are a wonderful team in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But better?
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