I've spent the majority of this month either in travel or working so I've watched far fewer films than I usually do, to explain my inactivity on this board. Thankfully, quality makes up for quantity, hence all the bright red.
Bell Book and Candle
For the holiday though, I did rewatch one of my favorite holiday films, this classic B-side to
Vertigo's A-side. I've never thought this was an unimpeachable masterpiece, and it certainly doesn't compare objectively to Quine's
My Sister Eileen in terms of its filmmaking. It's sort of a rough mishmash of odds and ends that congeal together based on Quine's expert tonal control. Whereas in
Vertigo, the age difference between James Stewart and Kim Novak added to the general dynamic, here it's just sort of odd. Quine and James Wong Howe experiment with a variety of techniques––expressionistic lighting, zoom lenses, process filters, etc. to achieve some of their effects and they are fairly dated for the most part. A lot of the comedy that Stewart is saddled with is stale, and the faint outmoded sexual politics of the film is neither invisible nor savage enough as it is in
Sex and the Single Girl that it becomes an active point of the film.
And yet how I adore the film. Its subject––three witches in Greenwich Village who get involved with a straight-laced book publisher––takes both the witchcraft and the beatniks seriously enough to produce a genuinely atmospheric fantasy comedy in the hip locale of 50s New York. Wong Howe's cinematography is often stunning, no moreso than during a musical number in a nightclub by a French dancer-singer which feels like genuine beat culture; likewise witches are heavily coded with a counterculture vibe predicated on niche African artifacts, jazz, and foolish pranks. Elsa Lanchester, Ernie Kovacks, and Jack Lemmon aren't given much to do to be fair but what they are given they do with great joy and their usual charisma. Stewart is Stewart. But Novak––Novak gives one of her most dazzling performances, one only a true movie star could pull off. Her icy cool looks and attitude, constantly dressed in tightfitting black clothes, suggest someone on a higher plane than yourself, and after the heartache and tragedy of
Vertigo it's a great pleasure to see her control Jimmy instead. It's a complete piece of fluff, but its Christmastime setting and light tone and eccentric cast make it, at the very least, a must-watch around the holidays. Whether it will show up in my list remains to be seen: whether I will continue to watch it every holiday season is a certainty.
Some Came Running
In my earlier post in this thread, I mentioned that Minnelli's
Tea and Sympathy would likely find a place high on my list. Nothing has changed that, however, it will no longer be the highest ranking on my list by him, after rewatching this. I was prompted to revisit this, which I had seen many years before and which I didn't much care for, because of my interest in reading the novel. An experience like this is one that reminds you, full bodily, why you should revisit movies, books, albums, plays that you didn't much care for in the past, especially if you yourself have grown or changed significantly. Since watching
Some Came Running the first time, I had developed an interest in the Hollywood melodrama, and it has by now blossomed into a love full stop, intellectually and emotionally. All the things I thought I understood about Minnelli before, I realized now I didn't. I remember once writing a pathetic essay where I remarked that Minnelli often prioritized color, composition, lighting, etc. over the melodramatics of his pictures; this is obviously not the case. Like Sirk, (who, contrary to domino's critical summary I do not consider as an outstanding subverter––I love him for other reasons that I'll get to when I do my write-ups of his films), Minnelli embraces his characters and plots with those plastic qualities, and because he so exceedingly manages to shape his material through his aesthetic aims, he avoids unintended banality or self-parody: he avoids cliché.
From the very opening, we begin with a strange dissonance between music and image: the image is a man on a bus, daytime, with the bright yellow of the credits overlayed, sleeping, and yet the music, bombastic and dreading, suggests tragedy and doom. The reverse shot, prompted by the bus driver waking up Frank Sinatra's Dave Hirsch, a former writer and GI and current drunk (and gambler), we have established the most important relationship of the film: Dave, in the foreground, and, in the background, mostly covered, sleeping, signaled by a bright red that will continue to signal her until the very end, Shirley MacLaine's Ginny, ignored by the film and Dave. When I say that the film's profundity and greatness is contained almost entirely in Ginny, I'm sure I will evoke skepticism, but for me, she is the Falstaff of this piece: MacLaine's performance is one for the ages, and the character as she plays it is contains such multitudes that I don't think I will ever be able to capture the funny heartbreak and the heartbreaking funniness of her. With her gaudy bright makeup and her rarely downtrodden attitude, she is truly a clown. This is a film nearly devoid of closeups––the wideness of the screen makes them rather difficult––but that doesn't stop Minnelli from providing her with an astonishingly vivid one: a cut from a three shot which makes her makeup seem excessive and trashy to the close-up focus on MacLaine, whose bright red lips and cheeks are suddenly transformed by the big red flower blooming out of the side of her head and the soft, gauzy lighting, and we understand suddenly, or should understand, that this character, who was left behind at the start of the film and then not seen again for almost a third of the running time, is the moral center of the film, the heart of this film. Minnelli loves beauty, and it's significant that he sees such startling, radiant beauty in her. MacLaine and Minnelli spare no opportunities, however, for providing Ginny with as many moments of confident shattered as possible however. The scene where she's talking to Dave as he's packing up, following him back and forth, literally into the closet, simply to keep his attention as much as she can, can only resemble a puppy dog trying to get attention. And I find myself continually thinking of the shot, where Ginny starts crying while talking to the schoolteacher Gwen, and bows her head, and the camera for a quiet moment fixates on the dark brown roots of her hair. It was either this scene, or the following one where she congratulates Dave on her story and he berates her, but I found myself literally in tears for long minutes, crying in pity about how sad kind people can be. I spent most of the film scoffing at the grand achievement of her performance, unable to keep myself from vocalizing the soft pangs of identification with the vulnerability MacLaine is able to achieve by so many subtle effects. And I don't think anyone has achieved such a perfect portrayal of cluelessness as she has when Dave interrogates her about her story.
The climax of the film, the carnival, has rightly been praised for its color and dynamism––it surely does play like a tour-de-force when you're in the rhythm of the film––but the tragic finish of that sequence is what made this film transcend for me as a great film, and not just a really, really good film with a great performance in it (I don't think the other plots in the film are bad, or weigh the film down, contrary to my lack of comment on them). I remembered very specifically how the film ended, so I was prepared for it with a stomachache, much like how I feel watching
Vertigo. But Minnelli's staging of Ginny's murder is just as formally accomplished and audacious and heartbreaking and powerful as Sirk's staging of the end of
Imitation of Life, as whiteness engulfs all there. Here, Ginny's death is transformed, in romantic morbidity, or morbid romanticism, into the tragic wedding night she never gets. The wedding dress, the red (Ginny's signal color) of her blood, the kitsch pillow Dave bought for her earlier, placed gently under her head, and the final shot of the two, Dave leaning over her––hell, even down to the wooden crate they lay beside resembling a headboard (although this last point I take more tongue in cheek than the others)––Minnelli composes them as if they were in bed. Between the visual doubling of death and sleep (can you tell I studied Donne in college?), it also makes a full circle that brings us back to the opening of the film, where Dave is awake and Ginny asleep: the way he rubs his eyes, perhaps stopping tears, perhaps in disbelief at how quickly she's gone from his life, it's almost as if he's hoping she'll awaken once again.
Anatomy of a Murder
I wonder if this quite qualifies as a hang-out movie. Of course, there's a narrative drive to it, but the film's emphasis on how things happen at the expense often of what actually happens seems to diminish the pulse without slackening the pace. Preminger's stately direction allows the intellectually sophisticated material to shine, the characters to come through instantly, with an engagement that is akin more to conversation than observation. We are allowed so much information that we become just as capable of judging the responses of witnesses as others; consider when Manion is called back to the stand after the inmate Miller he attacks earlier in the film makes his claim. Why doesn't he admit that they argued about his wife?
This seems to be my first time watching the film as an adult, with a stronger sense of the reality of the world. Preminger's ambiguity and the film's fixation on the unknowability of people haunts the film, and for the first time I found myself unsure of whether or not Laura Manion was telling the truth: her recounting of the rape is so calm, so collected. The moment where she takes off the sunglasses so charged with a sort of sadomasochistic sexuality; and the bookending moment when the groundskeeper remarks that he felt bad for her, because she was crying when she and her husband left; it leaves one questioning, unsure. It all, of course, calls back to Preminger's film twelve years earlier,
Daisy Kenyon, where a distinction is made between melodrama and the facts: Preminger clearly doesn't believe there is a real difference between the two, but he's trying as hard as he can to avoid melodrama so as to best equip us to look at the world.
Anatahan
I think this might be von Sternberg's most fatalistic film, yet it still brims with the love of beautiful women; the carefully modulated monotone of his earlier films, where every element was chiseled towards a uniformity forged from his soul, has been replaced by the economical singularity of his literal first person, which in its droning quality that moves between reportage, philosophizing, and quotation (translation) resembles the early novel, primarily Daniel Defoe, whose
Robinson Crusoe,
Moll Flanders, and
Roxana all feel only slightly distanced from this, primarily in von Sternberg's complete disinterest in the economic mindset that dominates Defoe's narrators. Instead, love and power dominate, and the shifts in power, both erotic and violent, are constantly the subject. The conclusion is devastating, as von Sternberg makes clear the dissonance between the unspoken narrative of the men we have just witnessed, and the reduced summary that serves as the basis for their reception as heroes. Their shame is their own. Keiko resembles most of all not the other Queen of von Sternberg's oeuvre, Catherine, but rather Concha from
The Devil Is a Woman; instead of that film's rococo parody of misogyny, however, here we have a subjective portrait of a woman which is arguably divorced from the proceedings (it is, indeed, difficult whether the events we witness are an abstraction of the narration, or indeed the truth) and therefore depicts a character who is neither baselessly villainous and lusty nor simplistically moral. And the shift, at the very finale, to her perspective, as she watches the men who claimed power over her, now dead, walk towards her as they never will in life, makes clear that for all his fatalism, von Sternberg has the heart of a romantic: Emily Brontë perhaps is his nearest kin in depicting the savagery of men and women, dominated by love.
No Down Payment and Peyton Place
A Jerry Wald double feature tonight, both of these rocked me with their savage indictment of American suburbian society (although
Peyton Place surprised me by not being set in the suburbs of the 50s, which is what I expected!) The latter already has its defenders on here, whose defenses and praise for the film top anything I can provide on first watch, although I do want to say that I think that the film is slightly deficient in its handling of the multiple narrative threads in terms of its comparisons. I couldn't help but laugh at Lana Turner's breakdown at the climactic trial, which I don't think is quite as self-aware as Sirk's savage takedown of her in
Imitation of Life (wherein her performance of motherly grief is quite literally a parody of the other mother-daughter relationship in the film)––whereas earlier in the film when she says to Nellie that "everyone as problems" as Nellie tries to obliquely reveal that her daughter has been raped feels at least heavily ironic with some judgment on her. Selena's narrative throughout was overwhelmingly powerful, however. It's difficult to get the same sense of sociopolitical analysis that others have commented on, hence my reservations, but it's certainly a hell of a melodrama, even if none of the other parts compare to Selena's.
No Down Payment has a similar situation, in that Joanne Woodward's performance and characterization is clearly the strongest (not unlike Ginny in characterization), but the other narrative threads are just as rich. I actually find much of the sociopolitical analysis that others see in
Peyton Place much more present here, as the film takes on a very naturalistic structure: it feels almost at times like we're scientists, watching specimens live in their own little compartments, and then be let out to interact with others, producing reactions for us to study. There is a strong claustrophobia to the film, and the characters' own sense of "this is it"ness can be palpably felt. It stumbles in its finale, but how could it not? Racism is solved magically; the rapist is disposed of instantly. This is an ejector-seat ending that leaves us with great discomfort, as it should, but not quite as much as some of Sirk's or John Cromwell's. But the film, better than any other 50s film I've seen yet, manages to diagnose the American individual's sickness: complacency, conformity, repression, self-medication, delusions of grandeur, smothering by objects, entitlement––you name it, this film savages it.
Obviously a lot of it is in the novel as well, but I've wondered if Kubrick was inspired by Ray's film, which he must have seen. (There's a central stairwell scene there as well). Of course the theme you articulate here obviously was completely revolutionary in the earlier decade.
I think some of the other wonderful late films of Ozu are actually less "complicated".