Beginning to catch up

In posting my David Lean career retrospective (see below), I was shocked to see that it had been more than two months since my previous post, and now it's longer since.  I’ve seen a lot of films over that period, so it will take a while to bring myself up to date.  I intend to follow with wrap-ups of well-rated recent films and documentaries, plus outstanding tv series, but in this catch-all I’m including a bunch of English-language classics that I’ve been re-watching, many on the big screen at the Clark.  Expect a chatty approach to some familiar movies.

Tying Cinema Salon film club screenings into the official Clark series Widescreen Wonders, I looked at some other well-known movie directors beside Lean.  While William Wyler’s style of filmmaking in Ben-Hur (1959) is as antiquated as the Victorian piety of the original novel by a former Civil War general, it shows to spectacular advantage in a recent digital restoration.  Projected on the big screen from a Blu-Ray disk through a hi-def projector at the Clark, it was a new-fangled way to have an old-fashioned movie-going experience.  Even in an age of CGI wonders, the chariot race remains mind-blowing, though large stretches of the movie may be mind-numbing.

For the film club, I showed The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), an Oscar Best Picture that certainly holds up on repeat viewings, also particularly well-suited to the big screen, though for depth of field rather than width of screen.  Wyler elicits much better acting than Ben-Hur’s static posing and forced grimaces, from Frederic March, Dana Andrews, and Harold Russell as three servicemen returning to their small Midwestern city after WWII, a theme with plenty of contemporary relevance as we have so many veterans struggling to adjust after our recent long wars.  The wives and sweethearts to whom they return are equally well portrayed by Myrna Loy and Teresa Wright.  The difference between Cathy O’Donnell in this film and Ben-Hur is the difference between sweet and saccharine, real and reel.  I highly recommend you see this film, or see it again.

In his time William Wyler was the definition of a Hollywood director, with 12 Oscar nominations, more than anyone else.  Ever the craftsman, with four decades of memorable films, highlighted by the likes of The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver, Roman Holiday, and more, one Wyler that was new to me was Carrie (1952).  Like The Heiress, this is an excellent adaptation of a classic American novel, Theodore Dreiser this time instead of Henry James, and like Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, features an outstanding performance by Laurence Olivier, again with an actress who can’t keep up with him, this time Jennifer Jones.  There are simply notes that Mrs. Selznick cannot strike, while Olivier plays a symphony of emotions, as a successful Chicago restaurateur around 1900, brought low by a soiled young beauty determined to rise and become an actress.  A little-known gem worth seeking out.   

Judging by attendance at Clark screening, The Deer Hunter (1978) is not an experience most people care to repeat, but Michael Cimino’s film retains  power as well as flaws.  Some scenes seem too raw to relive, and some are overblown, but many are lovely and evocative.  The strength of performances by Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep is augmented by all we’ve seen of them in the ensuing decades.  Whatever the quibbles about veracity of depiction, the film does capture something essential about the experience of going to Vietnam and trying to return home again.   

With the recent release of a restored, definitive edition just out on Blu-Ray disk, I thought it was a great idea to tie-in a screening of Heaven’s Gate (1980) for Cinema Salon at the Clark.  Cimino’s follow-up to Deer Hunter turned into an infamously expensive flop that destroyed a studio, but it is still a spectacle to behold, if not ultimately a good film.  Once again the meticulousness of period recreation is marred by excessive dramatic license, and smothered in self-indulgence.  But there are some terrific scenes in the movie, particularly three whirling circles, a dance at the Harvard graduation of 1870 (actually shot at a totally different-looking Oxford, both of which are quite familiar to me from my son’s attendance), a roller skating extravaganza at the eponymous frontier recreation hall, and a classic Western circle-the-wagons shootout.  With Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, and Isabelle Huppert, the acting is all over the map, and the triangle amongst them is hardly convincing.  The political setting of a Wyoming war between settlers and ranchers is given too overt and inaccurate a context, by making the settlers mostly Eastern European.  So one can take scene-by-scene satisfactions, without trying to make sense of the whole.  Only four people joined me for the screening, and I questioned my rationale for showing it, but a week later the restored version opened in New York, and a Times critic wrote a feature piececelebrating the re-release, so in retrospect I must simply have been too hip for the room

Blade Runner (1982) has never figured among my favorite films -- nor sci-fi as a genre -- but I gave it another chance under optimum conditions, a restored Final Cut version by Ridley Scott, shown in hi-def on the big screen at the Clark.  Sorry, still no sale.  Now that we are only a few years away from the 2019 setting of the film, it’s fair to say that the dystopian future of LA hardly looks prescient.  The pre-digital evocation of an alternate reality is pretty remarkable, and the whole thing is quite stylish, but I never cared enough to follow the story in its twists and turns, Harrison Ford notwithstanding.

Gangs of New York (2002) was another film I watched in big-screen hi-def mainly for the set design, in its evocation of New York City around 1860, a time and place I’m trying to write about.  Turns out for my purposes the best thing on the Blu-Ray disk was an extra -- Martin Scorsese and set designer Dante Ferretti walking around the abandoned set at Cinecittà and talking about the historical referents for all its features.  Leonardo DiCaprio always delivers in Scorsese films, and Daniel Day-Lewis contributes another of his powerfully eccentric performances, and the whole, despite exaggerations, sustains a sense of authenticity.  But then the film overreaches, and overlays the gang battles with the larger story of the New York draft riots of 1863 and their suppression by the army, and one is left with a muddle.  There’s an implicit but unclear theme of organized violence -- national rather than local -- supplanting disorganized tribal warfare. I wish Scorsese had stayed with one sort of narrative or the other.

 

I have been on a classic Hollywood kick recently, partly because of reading a  new book, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies, by my favorite film historian, David Thomson .  Also, there were two new films about Alfred Hitchcock, both suggesting that the master of creeping suspense was a creep himself, which led me back to several films by him.   Hitchcock (2013, MC-55, NFX) boasted the star-power of Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, with Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh in the behind-the-scenes story of making Psycho, but I preferred HBO’s unmemorably-titled The Girl (2013, NFX).  As with dueling Truman Capote films a few years ago, Toby Jones delivered the more evocative impersonation of a cultural icon, but was overshadowed by a more celebrated actor.  Imelda Staunton also more than held her own as Alma Hitchcock, and Sienna Miller outdid Scarlett, playing Tippi Hedren as she endured Hitchcock’s rebuffed sexual advances and subsequent sadism in the making of The Birds, then got trapped into coming back for more in Marnie.

So I showed a Hitchcock double feature to Cinema Salon.  Strangers on a Train (1952) remains a classic, perhaps Hitch’s most perfect film, with Robert Wagner and Farley Granger in a criss-crossing game-set-and-match, back and forth, the mad and the supposedly sane, the guilty and the would-be innocent, brothers in murderous intent. Despite portrayals of a dingbat mother and a shrewish cheating wife to demonstrate his misogyny, Hitchcock spares us his sick obsession with the Grace Kelly blond.  As well put together as this film is, I’ve seen it too often for it to retain any surprises for me. 

On the other hand, I hadn’t seen Rear Window (1954) more than once before, and never on the big screen, which is vital to its appreciation.  And here we get Grace Kelly herself, instead of a simulacrum, and one begins to understand the obsession, though Jimmy Stewart seems immune, until she shows the moxie to do some dangerous sleuthing for him, as a photographer immobilized in a leg cast who can only do his apartment courtyard snooping though a telescopic lens.  A film of great formal brilliance, it’s also a self-reflexive meditation on filmmaking, of making up stories out of what you see through the lens.  Really terrific.

This seemed like a good time to take another look at Marnie (1964), which made a big impact on me as a teenager, after my mother wouldn’t let me see Psycho at all a few years before.  Marnie seemed kinky and eye-opening then, and still has a strong visual impact, even if the psychology of the characters is risible.  Tippi Hedren is every bit the model-turned-actress, but that remoteness suits her role.  Sean Connery takes a break from James Bond and is hunky and sympathetic, until he’s not.  By that era, the studio-stylized backdrops (so perfectly exemplified in Rear Window) began to scream fake, but I’m inclined to cut Hitch a little slack here. I like this film at least as much as Vertigo, which is not among my Hitchcock favorites, let alone the #1 film of all time, as recently consecrated by the Sight & Sound international critics poll. 

I don’t believe I’d seen either version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, so I sampled both the 1934 and 1956 versions, but can’t say I was grabbed by either.  There are a number of Hitchcocks that I wouldn’t mind watching again, but I don’t feel enough connection with his personality or worldview to mount a full-blown retrospective.

The same may be true of Billy Wilder.  David Thomson’s book prompted me to take another look at Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Some Like It Hot (1959), both of which were better than I remembered, and The Apartment (1960), which delivered not quite as strong a punch as when it hit a certain 13-year-old below the belt, but fun to see again under the shadow of early Mad Men.  Add Double Indemnity and you have a number of impressive peaks in the range of an up-and-down but generally elevated career.  Sunset is a great dissection of Tinseltown mythology, and Hot a grand parade of humorous sexual ambiguity, both startlingly frank for their time, as is Apartment in its unblinking look at sexual power plays and career advancement in the world of a NYC corporate office.  Much Hollywood star power in each.

Another re-look prompted by Thomson was A Place in the Sun (1951).  George Stevens may have drained Dreiser’s American Tragedy of its scathing social commentary, and turned it into a steamy romance in which the audience hopes the “hero” gets away with murder, but Montgomery Clift and 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor ignite the screen, and Shelly Winters is effective as the factory girl who stands in the way of our guy getting the rich girl.  It’s lushly produced, a Hollywood prestige picture in every detail, but on its own terms, very well done. 

Better than well-done is My Fair Lady (1964) – what a revelation to see it again in a restored version on Blu-Ray!  Quibbles about Audrey Hepburn replacing Julie Andrews and not singing in her own voice seem like ancient history – she’s perfect in the role of Eliza.  (And Mary Poppins wound up taking the consolation prize of Oscar for Best Actress.)  Just about everything in the movie is perfect.  Talk about a musical that holds up over time!  I enjoyed the film so much that I took another look at Pygmalion (1938).  Wendy Hiller is equally perfect as Eliza, and as Higgins, Leslie Howard is as good, and a touch more sympathetic, than Rex Harrison.  It’s amazing how many of the song lyrics come straight from George Bernard Shaw’s dialogue.

Top Hat (1935) got me off on a Fred Astaire kick, but so far I haven’t found another of his films that delivers such pure sustained delight in dance, such a distillation of champagne bubbles, frothy, light as air, a toast to joyful living.  Ginger Rogers is a marvel, but the chemistry doesn’t work quite as well in the too strenuous hilarity of Swing Time (1936).  Where you rate The Band Wagon (1953) depends on how much you fall for Cyd Charisse, and how little you’re bothered by Astaire partnering with a much younger woman.  Again there’s too much underlining to the process of putting on a show, long past the effortless effervescence of Top Hat.  A friend recommends The Gay Divorcee, which I will check out at first opportunity. 

P.S. -- TCM wasted no time in providing the opportunity for a double feature of Fred and Ginger.  The Gay Divorcee (1934) was the first film in which they were leads together, and not without enjoyable moments, but still trying too hard, with standard bedroom farce, second-banana jokes, and an endless, elephantine group dance number called “The Continental.”  The new Hays office made them add an -e to the title, but wasn’t swift enough to scrub away all the double entendre.  Still, I was ready for more Rogers and Astaire, so I went right on to Follow the Fleet (1936), which I found refreshing in its more plebian setting, with Astaire and Randolph Scott as seamen on leave in San Francisco, opposite Rogers and Harriet Hilliard (before she married Ozzie and had Ricky) as sisters whom they pursue or are pursued by.  Inevitably, Fred and Ginger wind up in evening clothes anyway, agreeing to “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”  You know, I’m not musically sharp enough to distinguish Cole Porter from Irving Berlin, so all these musicals blend together for me, but Top Hat remains tops by me.

I come to no conclusion here, but pledge to be back soon to cover dozens of films, documentaries, and tv series I’ve been watching over the past half-year.