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Saturday, June 28
PAS DE DEUX
by
Lloydville
on Sat 28 Jun 2008 04:52 PM PDT
In any kind of musical theater that involves dance, from ballet to a book musical, a pas de deux can dramatize a lot of different things -- flirtation, romantic exhilaration, the dawning or the fading of love. Because it involves a complex physical conversation between two people it almost always evokes the sexual act itself, and sometimes it does so in a very conscious way. It can do this without ever making explicit physical references to the sexual act, and is usually most effective when it doesn't -- when it evokes the moods and the moral evolutions of sex, mistrust, anxiety, curiosity, trust, surrender, transcendence. It can chart the interior narrative of sex, rather than its mechanics, mechanics which one proper British lady once described as "always the same ridiculous motions". The pas de deux can be a kind of metaphysical pornography.
(Image © Paul Kolnik)
It is certainly that in the ballets of the great choreographer George Balanchine, whose whole body of work can be seen as a meditation on the etiquette of sex. He saw a relationship between the formal behavior of ceremonial occasions and the courtly rituals of the boudoir -- for him, the two arenas of life informed each other, celebrated each other. His pas de deux could be funky, raunchy, wild and on the edge of control, but there was always an element of graciousness in them, of the mutual sympathy that fuels genuine physical passion. They were always about sex as an expression of love, whether sacred or profane.
The pas de deux in the musicals Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made at RKO in the 1930s are almost always about the sexual act, and very consciously so. "Of course, Ginger was able to accomplish sex through dance," Astaire
once said. "We told more through our movements instead of the big
clinch. We did it all in dance." Hermes Pan, who collaborated with Astaire in the creation of his dances, said, "We showed things you couldn't talk about."
After their first great pas de deux, in The Gay Divorcee, danced in a seaside pavilion to the music of Cole Porter's "Night and Day", Rogers falls back on a settee in a dreamy post-orgasmic languor. Astaire stands over her with a kind of cocksure but slightly goofy satisfaction and offers her a cigarette -- a classic post-coital ritual. (The production still above doesn't really do justice to the moment.)
In Roberta, probably the worst of their RKO vehicles, the characters they play (second leads) don't have much of a romantic narrative. They seem attracted to each other from the start, and the only suspense in the relationship comes from wondering when they're going to admit it to each other. It happens, of course, after they do a highly sexualized dance at the end of the film. They exit the arena they danced in and backstage Rogers again collapses in dreamy exhaustion. "I think I'm going to have to give in to you," she says. Astaire asks her what she's talking about. "I thought you were going to ask me to marry you," she answers. "I was," he says. "All right then," she says, "I will." "Thank you," he says -- and they shake on it.
It funny and charming, and the gag works because he's already told her he loves her, already asked her to marry him, and she's already said yes -- in the dance.
In
Astaire's early years when he danced in vaudeville with his sister,
their act always had a narrative element -- it told a little story in
twelve minutes or so. In the romantic pas de deux
he created for himself and Rogers on screen he never lost sight of the
fact that the best sex always has the dynamics, the lineaments, of a
good story. It was an insight he and Balanchine shared.
Balanchine considered Astaire to be the greatest dancer of the 20th Century -- and Balanchine had seen all of them, worked with most of them. It undoubtedly wasn't just Astaire's technique that impressed Balanchine, it was his expressiveness, and the fact that for both men sexual love was at the center of their artistic imaginations.
Thursday, June 26
A FELLA WITH AN UMBRELLA
by
Lloydville
on Thu 26 Jun 2008 02:08 AM PDT
I'm just a fella,
A fella with an umbrella,
Looking for a girl who's saved
Her love for a rainy day.
Easter Parade, a film from 1948 produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Charles Walters, featured a cascade of songs by Irving Berlin, including a few of his great ones, but Berlin told his daughter that his favorite song in the film was "A Fella With An Umbrella". This surprised her, because it seemed so simple and modest -- almost a throwaway. But it's not really simple and modest at all -- or no more simple and modest than a stolen kiss.
A bit of doggerel is transformed by a surprising twist into an image of sweet, lyrical gallantry, echoed precisely by the lilting melody. What it is . . . is perfect.
The song is sung in the film by Peter Lawford and Judy Garland on a New York back-lot street, in pouring studio rain, mostly under an umbrella. Lawford delivers his part of the duet with charming amateurishness -- the choreography of their stroll is also simple . . . and just as charming. As in most Freed musicals, the perfectly calculated musical arrangement adds yet another level of enchantment to the number.
Check out the film, which is full of such moments.
Tuesday, June 24
ARTHUR FREED: THE PRODUCER AS AUTHOR
by
Lloydville
on Tue 24 Jun 2008 02:37 AM PDT
In the history of the classical Hollywood studio system there were only a handful of producers with an authorial voice which could be read in the overall body of their work. Among them I would place Walt Disney, Val Lewton and Arthur Freed.
Disney of course owned his own studio, which operated just outside the Hollywood mainstream. Disney didn't write, design, draw or direct the great animated films on which his reputation rests, but he exercised total control over all these functions and he communicated a vision to his in-house artists of the films he wanted them to make. He was technically a producer, but so involved in the minutiae of artistic decision-making at his studio, and in such absolute command of them, that he is rightly considered the primary author of his films.
Lewton and Freed operated independent units within more traditional studios. They both specialized in genre pictures -- B-horror films and musicals, respectively -- and as long as they turned out profitable examples of these genres, they were given an unusual degree of control over their films. Lewton was subject to more interference from higher-ranking executives at RKO -- Freed enjoyed a close personal friendship with MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer and Mayer had an unshakable faith in Freed's judgment, which allowed Freed extraordinary freedom of action within his designated sphere. It was only with Mayer's ouster from MGM that succeeding studio heads began to interfere drastically with Freed's films, but even then only on his non-musical efforts.
Other prominent producers of the studio era achieved great power and prestige, but none of them communicated a clear authorial voice in their work. The films Hitchcock made for legendary producer David O. Selznick are best read as Hitchcock films, and even Gone With the Wind, Selznick's greatest triumph, owes its voice more to the artists who actually made it than to Selznick's vision as its producer. (Duel In the Sun, which may be the best expression of Selznick's "vision" as an artist, is a sprawling, unwieldy mess -- the vision at the core of it is in fact a vacuum.)
John Houseman, another legendary producer with a reputation for independence and good taste, was capable of producing both Citizen Kane and The Bad and the Beautiful, a film that consciously evokes Kane -- but the two films couldn't be more different in sensibility, in political and moral orientation. They better reflect the visions of their directors, Orson Welles and Vincente Minnelli, than the authorial voice of Houseman. (James Naremore, in The Films Of Vincente Minnelli, has written a brilliant analysis of the fundamental ways in which these two films differ.)
Of course no one person is ever the sole author of anything as complex and collaborative as a Hollywood studio film, on which many hands leave their mark. One can discover themes in Selznick's work, consistent from film to film, and a level of taste in Houseman's films which characterize all of them. But most great films are organized around a single vision, a single sensibility, despite some remarkable exceptions to the rule -- like Casablanca, for example.
That single vision may in fact be the result of a harmonious meeting of two or more minds -- between Toland and Welles, say, or, Freed and Minnelli -- but it remains singular all the same. Toland never worked on another film like Kane and Minnelli made different kinds of films when he worked apart from Freed.
Most great producers in the studio system functioned as editors function in the literary world. Editors in both realms can exert enormous influence, for good or bad, on the work they edit -- proposing subjects, making crucial artistic suggestions, cutting superfluous material or asking for additional work. But we don't confuse even the most brilliant and creative literary editors, like Maxwell Perkins (above), with the authors of the books they edited -- and by the same token we shouldn't confuse even the most powerful and celebrated Hollywood producers, like Thalberg, Selznick, Zanuck and Houseman, with the authors of the films they supervised.
But I would argue that Freed, like Disney and Lewton, was more than an editor, more than a supervisor.
Disney's freedom of action flowed from his ownership of his studio -- Lewton's and Freed's flowed flowed from other conditions, which were quite unusual. As I've said, both worked in conventional genres. They were specialists who were presumed to know as much about their specialties as anyone above or below them in the chain of command. As long as their films reached and pleased their intended markets, their bosses had no incentive to second-guess them, even when they indulged in radical innovations, as both did.
RKO market-tested titles and handed the most popular of them over to Lewton, who was expected to come up with films that matched them. In fact, he came up with very strange takes on these titles, films that were unlike any other horror films ever made, but they performed well at the box office and that was all RKO cared about.
Freed, as I've noted, had the friendship and the strong personal backing of his top boss in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer -- but even that went only so far in terms of corporate support. It was the four films Freed produced at the start of his career starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney that ensured his independence. These films were made at relatively low cost (for musicals) and earned a fortune. From then on he rarely faltered in terms of profitability for the studio. He had only a few flops and a few films that broke even -- the rest made good money. Mayer was inclined to let Freed do what he wanted -- the bottom line on Freed's films allowed him to justify this to his corporate overlords in New York.
It's instructive to note, however, that when the public lost interest in Lewton's type of horror film, almost no one in Hollywood had much interest in working with him -- and he himself didn't quite seem to know what to do with himself. And when Mayer was ousted as MGM's studio head, Freed's position grew more and more precarious. He was still given his head on musical productions, but his non-musical films were interfered with and sometimes mutilated beyond recognition. He had no inherent prestige or power as a filmmaker. When it was felt that audiences were losing interest in musicals, or more precisely that their costs made them too risky a gamble, Freed stopped being able to get projects off the ground altogether. He left MGM heartbroken over his failure to make a bio-pic about Irving Berlin, which he felt would be the culmination of his whole life's work.
Disney, Lewton and Freed were also artists in their own right. Disney may not have been a great animator but he could do it. Lewton was a writer who contributed not only ideas and stories to his films but also co-wrote some of them, under a pseudonym. Freed was a very successful lyricist who had contributed songs to many different kinds of musical theater. The direct contributions all three made to their films were not as significant as the fact that each knew how to talk to the artists who made them as peers. They conducted their editorial and supervisory business in the language of artists, not the language of corporate production.
The point to be made by all this is that producers in the Hollywood system needed very special personal qualities and very special circumstances in which to create an authorial voice, and so it's no wonder that there weren't more of them who did.
Walt Disney has received an enormous amount of critical attention, and there are numerous studies of Lewton's films, but Freed's films, as a body of work, have been covered in only one book -- The World Of Entertainment by Hugh Fordin, from 1973. Fordin's study is largely anecdotal, and while it draws on a great deal of documentary evidence, much of it apparently supplied by Freed himself, and on extensive interviews with some of Freed's collaborators, it is hardly a scholarly work. Nor does it offer much critical insight into the films as artistic achievements.
The neglect of Freed can be partly attributed to the fact that many of his greatest films were directed by Minnelli. There are lots of critical studies of Minnelli, and these seem to "cover" Freed's contributions to the Hollywood musical by treating him as little more than an enabler of the auteur director. But, as I say, the films Minnelli made for other producers are very different from the films he made for Freed, and the films made by other directors in Freed's unit at MGM have many crucial things in common with the Freed-Minnelli collaborations.
Freed's body of work has a coherence, a distinctive and unifying sensibility, which deserves examination on its own. His artistic vision developed in a systematic way -- its progress is comprehensible and illuminating, as are its roots.
I think a case can be made that Freed was just as much an "author" as Disney or Lewton and that his films, taken as a whole, are just as important as theirs -- which makes them very important indeed.
Friday, June 20
SUBLIME HOKUM: Part Three, ARTHUR FREED
by
Lloydville
on Fri 20 Jun 2008 01:21 AM PDT
In some ways, Arthur Freed was perfectly placed to carry the Hollywood musical into the future. A product of the vaudeville era, he became a very successful lyricist, supplying songs, mostly in collaboration with Nacio Herb Brown, to every kind of musical entertainment offered on American stages.
He had a deep sentimental attachment to the traditions of American show business, especially vaudeville, but he was also a visionary, who knew that the traditions he loved could only survive in new forms that appealed to a new generation.
The key to his vision was Judy Garland, a kid but also a second-generation vaudevillian. Five of the first seven musicals he produced were vehicles for Garland, and in three of these she starred with Mickey Rooney, another kid with roots in vaudeville. All of Freed's Garland-Rooney musicals -- there were four all told -- were backstage ("Hey, kids, let's put on a show!") stories, and they each paid conscious tribute to the vaudeville tradition, but somehow Garland and Rooney made it all seem new. Partly this was because of their own youthful personae and partly because they made their bows to the past with an affectionate irony.
But Freed was just getting going. I don't know how consciously Freed was inspired by the art of Fred Astaire, whose sublimely expressive dancing suggested a whole new range of expression for musicals, showing how a down-home American sensibility could be conveyed in a supremely elegant form. However direct the influence, Freed got the message somehow.
The Garland-Rooney musicals have a down-home flavor. Garland and Rooney may play aspiring show business performers, with a virtuosity far beyond their years, but they are also icons of the American boy and girl next door. The musical films they did together combine melodrama with the more traditional elements of romantic comedy, as had the non-musical Andy Hardy films they made before they worked with Freed. There was corn-pone sentiment, about teen love and the family, mixed up with the nostalgia for vaudeville and the newfangled Hollywood razzmatazz.
Astaire and Rogers, in most of their films, play ordinary Americans slumming amongst the very rich in café society. In the Garland-Rooney musicals, home is the defining environment. Freed was feeling his way towards a new kind of domestic musical, which would reach its apotheosis in Meet Me In St. Louis.
Parallel with this new development, Freed remained true to the variety format, in films such as Ziegfeld Follies (above), a revue directed by Minnelli, who was also the director of Meet Me In St. Louis. And he continued to make backstage musicals like The Band Wagon and Singing In the Rain (actually a backlot musical), though even these had a more naturalistic tone than the surreal spectacles of Busby Berkeley in the 1930s.
Yet for all their relative naturalism, these films were highly stylized on a cinematic level. Freed hired Berkeley to direct the Garland-Rooney musicals, in a somewhat more muted style than he was known for, and in Minnelli he found an even more elegant and subtle cinematic magician. Freed realized that old-fashioned show-biz exaggeration, a dash of sublime hokum, had to be applied to the visual style of a musical, even as it explored the simpler virtues of life.
Freed created something new under the sun out of bits and pieces of things recovered from the attic of his fondest show-biz memories. He realized that the more show business changes, the more it remains the same, and he negotiated the paradox with impeccable flair.
Wednesday, June 18
CREATURE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 18 Jun 2008 01:21 AM PDT
Cyd Charisse died on Tuesday at the age of 86. She was a powerful, elegant dancer in many of the great Hollywood musicals, with a technique grounded in her early ballet training.
She had an odd screen persona -- distant but also intimidating. She didn't have great range as an actress, but she also seemed to hold herself in reserve in front of a camera by choice, except when she was dancing -- and even when she was dancing, there was something held back. When she was at her sexiest she still seemed to be saying, "This is naughty, isn't it? But it's not for you."
She had the quality of a mythological creature, a female spirit incarnated, with a mystery that was never up for grabs -- not for sale at any price.
One of her greatest moments was a dance she did in It's Always Fair Weather -- in a boxing gym with tough-looking fighters for a supporting chorus line. The only tribute she would accept from the all-male crowd was abject worship. She looked tougher than all of them put together.
SUBLIME HOKUM: Part Two - THE AMERICAN MUSICAL
by
Lloydville
on Wed 18 Jun 2008 12:30 AM PDT
As I wrote in my first post on this subject, American show business has a surreal, incoherent quality which reflects the surreal, incoherent quality of American culture as a whole. It wants to synthesize elements which resist synthesis.
In some ways, vaudeville was the quintessential form of American show business, simply because its format allowed for incoherence. Dance, both high and low, ballet and tap, sentimental and comic songs, excerpts from classical plays, recitations of poems, acrobatics, juggling, animal acts, broad slapstick sketches, sing-along slide shows, rope and magic tricks, even, at the end of the line, movies, could all share the stage on a bill.
When something resembling the book musical appeared on Broadway, the vaudeville influence was great. Not only did vaudeville serve as a proving ground for the talents that created the modern musical theater -- musicians, songwriters and performers -- but it lent musical theater some of its grab-bag attitude.
The American book musical, a musical with songs interwoven into an overarching plot, was a kind of hybrid between European operetta and the vaudeville spirit. European operetta was very popular in America at the turn of the last century, but showmen intuited that a more American style, with pop songs and jazzier dancing would sell, too.
The books of book musicals still owed a lot to European traditions -- their plots tended to resemble drawing-room farces from the Continent, given a wise-cracking American twist. And the book musical didn't wholly dominate the New York musical stage until the 1940s. Revues, a higher-class version of vaudeville, competed for ticket dollars.
But even revues followed a path towards coherence. Vincente Minnelli, later perhaps the preeminent director of Hollywood musicals, became famous on Broadway for directing "themed revues" -- variety shows whose acts were tied together by consistent visual motifs. (Minnelli is seen above at his wedding to Judy Garland, a second-generation vaudevillian.)
When talkies opened the way for musicals on the big screen, the patterns of the New York stage were transferred to film. Lubitsch and Mamoulian created screen musicals that frankly imitated European farce -- they were, in essence, ironic, streamlined and faster-paced operettas. Actual operettas made their way onto film as well, along with "backstage musicals" -- technically book musicals but with built-in opportunities to feature just about any kind of variety number.
Alongside all these forms, the revue also survived, with screen variety shows featuring disparate acts tied together by the flimsiest of threads -- a radio broadcast, the high-points of a showman's or a songwriter's career.
And then there was Fred Astaire. On some level, Astaire changed everything. In the 1930s he appeared in musical movie revues and in book musicals, mostly with Ginger Rogers. The Rogers films were basically more sophisticated versions of the farce musicals which came into their own in the Princess Theater shows written by Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, starting in 1915.
The songs in the Astaire-Rogers films were usually integrated to a degree into the dramatic plot, moving it along and expressing character, but they retained the nature of "numbers" -- routines that existed for their own sakes. By contrast, the dances the couple did together, and those Astaire did alone, weren't "numbers", mere Terpsichorean interludes, in any sense. The pas de deux were masterpieces of erotic suggestion, of complex romantic emotions. They transported the characterizations of the dancers, the subtleties and the depths of their romantic engagement, to another level. They were both lyrical and profound. They also suggested a mature synthesis of European elegance and casual American wit beyond anything the American musical theater had ever seen.
Americans had never encountered Astaire's aw-shucks grace and style anywhere except in sporting events -- in the balletic beauty of a well-turned double play, for example.
This opened a door onto a whole new way of thinking about American musicals, a whole new expressive range for the form -- and it was Arthur Freed who led the Hollywood musical through that door.
Thursday, June 12
JUDY GARLAND BECOMES IMMORTAL
by
Lloydville
on Thu 12 Jun 2008 11:28 AM PDT
On the three-disc DVD edition of The Wizard Of Oz is an audio supplement featuring takes and outtakes from the recording sessions for the film, including about eight minutes of excerpts from the prerecording session for "Over the Rainbow" which produced the version Judy Garland lip-synced to on screen. She never performed the song better. In some ways the song feels too grown-up for little Dorothy, and Garland delivers it with a maturity beyond her years, but also with an inflection of simplicity and innocence that makes it work on every level in the film. The commercial recording of the song she did for Decca, which became a huge best-seller, is far less emotional and delicate.
In later years, as a concert performer, Garland turned the song into a bittersweet anthem for lost dreams, but it works best from the near side of hope, where the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.
Genius filmmaker Louis B. Mayer insisted that the song be removed from the film, because it slowed things down, but Arthur Freed put his job on the line to keep it in, and he prevailed.
Wednesday, June 11
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN
by
Lloydville
on Wed 11 Jun 2008 12:09 AM PDT
My friend Cotty writes to recommend the film The Edge Of Heaven and to record his disappointment at the small size of the audience he saw it with. He concludes:
Strange times in the movie business. Five independent distributors have disappeared or been absorbed or are under severe threat, all within the last sixty days. Warner Independent, Picturehouse, New Line, Vantage, and ThinkFilm all going or gone. Who will make and distribute movies that rely on audiences caring to leave the house just for the sake of the experience of the emotional connection that only movies can bring?
Despite complaints from disappointed or estranged film-makers, the fault, I think, lies not in our stars, or their managers or their studio enablers, but in ourselves. If we don't go, why should they build it?
Perhaps the Obama candidacy can revive a sense of connection, can remind us of a common experience of America's great strength in diversity, her powerful e pluribus unum past and the blunt necessity of shared response to global problems. But it will come too late to help Strand Releasing [distributor of The Edge Of Heaven] in its attempt to bring you a lovely and cinematic time in the darkened common room that is a movie theater.
Good thoughts for these bad movie times, but I'm inclined to play the Devil's advocate and argue that the public is never wrong -- that if good people shun good films, then there's something wrong with the films, at least as works of popular art. Films can be good and still not be works of popular art, but why are there so few good popular films?
The example of Obama's candidacy does, I think, point to the answer. Four years ago the American public rejected, by a slim margin, John Kerry, who would (I think we can all now say in hindsight) have been a better President than George Bush . . . but he wasn't the sort of President most Americans wanted. His candidacy reeked of Democratic Party caution and calculation, his case to the public was cast in Senatorial, which is to say, conventional Washington, rhetoric. He was a new version of the same old thing, so why not stick with the familiar version of the same old thing already installed in the White House?
If John Kerry and George Bush really are the same old thing, fundamentally, why not choose the guy you'd rather have a beer with? If the latest art-house release and the latest action-hero extravaganza are just variations on outdated paradigms, why not go see the one with the loudest explosions, the one everybody at school is going to be talking about next week?
One can come up with rational arguments against these propositions -- like the war in Iraq, for example, or the mind-numbing boredom of too much CGI -- but culture, political and artistic, is not a purely rational thing. It's too easy to convince yourself that George Bush might have known what he was doing when he invaded Iraq, or that the next Spiderman film is going to kick ass.
When politics and/or popular art don't reach something higher in us than business as usual, than commodity merchandising, we tend to rebel and refuse to make sensible distinctions between good and bad products. We often act against our own best interests out of a kind of unconscious rage . . . because we don't want politics or popular art to be about "products" at all, or not only about products.
I think this explains why Republicans have been able to persuade lower-income Americans to vote Republican against their own economic interests by pushing "values" buttons -- by suggesting that gay marriage, for example, is an assault on "the traditional family". It's irrational, but to such Americans even an irrational vote in favor of "the traditional family" makes more sense than pretending that one corporate-sponsored political product is better than another.
On the left, the phenomenon would explain all the votes for Ralph Nader in 2000, which may well have cost Al Gore the Presidency. More importantly, it explains the millions in the last two elections who voted with their rear-ends by planting them firmly on their couches and staying away from the polls altogether. Again, it seems irrational, contrary to self-interest, but in fact reflects, at least on one level, a perfectly rational disgust with the whole system.
This year the Democratic Party machine, with its support for Hillary Clinton, tried to offer Americans an even newer version of the same old political product -- a female political product! -- and came very close to putting it over on us.
Obama beat her not because he had a more effective mask covering his political product-ness -- a black political product! -- but because his whole campaign, everything about him, felt genuinely different. He spoke in a new kind of language which we've hardly ever heard from Washington, he raised money from small-time donors which made him independent of the Democratic Party machine, he sent out an army of organizers who didn't look or act or talk like party hacks.
And yet . . . he spoke to old values, to popular concerns, to the shared e pluribus unum past Cotty mentions, one that is still with us, still capable of inspiring us.
The lesson in this for me, as it relates to movies, is that the mass of people don't really want anything that has the stink of current movie logic on it -- neither wonderful little art-house movies nor committee-made would-be blockbusters. They'll settle for them, if they can't get anything better, but in smaller and smaller numbers and with less and less enthusiasm.
They want something that feels different on a molecular level, the way Obama's campaign feels different on a molecular level. They want a change, a fundamental change -- even though that change, like Obama's rhetoric, may take us back to old, forgotten truths.
Movies, like Obama, don't have to choose between an isolated integrity and pandering to the tastes of the masses -- they can choose another path . . . honoring the tastes of the masses, as Obama has honored the aspirations of a broad public. The key is believing that the aspirations of the broad public are worth honoring, and trusting the broad public to respond. It requires a leap of faith, a violation of all conventional wisdom, a wild kind of hope. It requires, in short, something as improbable as Barack Obama's candidacy.
So my question to filmmakers is, as one Obama bumper sticker puts it -- Got hope?
Tuesday, June 10
THE CLOCK
by
Lloydville
on Tue 10 Jun 2008 09:35 AM PDT
THE FILM
The genius of Hollywood in its Golden Age was in glamorizing simple virtue -- the most famous case in point being Casablanca, which managed to make the sacrifice of true love for a higher cause seem unspeakably cool.
Another film made during and about WWII is in some ways even more impressive and certainly more moving. In Vincente Minnelli's The Clock Judy Garland plays a Manhattan secretary who meets a serviceman, played by Robert Walker, on 48-hour leave in the city before heading overseas.
What "heading overseas" suggested when the film was made (1944) has to be kept in mind while watching The Clock today, because it's crucial to every moment of the film, which takes the full measure of what it means to fall in love in the face of mortal peril. In some ways the gravity of the lovers' predicament in this tale is what allows Minnelli to pull off the miracle at the heart of it -- giving the story of two totally ordinary people the grandeur of the most sublime romance from legend or myth.
James Agee wrote a beautiful appreciation of the film when it came out, which can be found in his collected criticism, Agee On Film, and can't be improved upon, but check out this interesting view from a contemporary blog, The Sheila Variations. It's worth pointing out, too, that this was the first non-musical film directed by Minnelli and produced by Arthur Freed, who had the previous year collaborated on one of the greatest movies ever made in Hollywood, Meet Me In St. Louis, a musical also starring Judy Garland.
Garland and Minnelli were in love during the making of these films, and Minnelli's feeling for the actress informs every frame of them -- she is a radiant being in these movies, glamorized, certainly, but in a down-to-earth way that suggests the way ordinary people glamorize a new love. Minnelli seemed to find everything about her enchanting, which is why he could present her in such simple roles without feeling a need to "sell" her charms in any way, to make her larger than life. For him, clearly, she was already larger than life, even when she walked across a room or ate some soup.
Garland doesn't behave like a star in The Clock -- she doesn't need to. The state of being loved relieves her of the need to appeal to any outside authority for approval. The result is paradoxical. She grows as an actor, becomes more fascinating as a screen presence, even as she retires into herself, makes us comes to her.
Like James Cameron's Titanic, The Clock manages to convey the narrative of a life-long love in a very compressed period of time -- the awareness of death in both stories allows us, as it forces the characters, to read immense import into the simplest gestures, the most modest acts of sympathy and kindness, the plainest impulses of physical attraction.
In The Clock, as in the beginning of any real love affair, less is more. The way Garland adjusts Walker's tie at the train station before saying goodbye to him tells us more about the wedding night they've just shared than any dramatization of it could have suggested. Its very discreetness evokes the privacy of genuine intimacy, and yet we share it, not as voyeurs but as privileged participants in its magic.
As Garland leaves Walker's train the camera follows her and then rises up inexorably, in one long, tracking crane shot, until she's lost in the crowd at the station -- her story, which is our story, too, now, becomes one story among many, and no less extraordinary for that.
THE VISUAL STYLE
Although the tracking crane shot described above is one of the most beautiful and effective single images in all of cinema, The Clock is not a consistently interesting film visually. Set in New York but shot almost entirely on the back lot of MGM in Culver City, it relies very heavily on backscreen projections, which cumulatively produce a claustrophobic effect. This doesn't hurt the story too badly, since part of Minnelli's strategy in telling it is to focus our attention closely on the growing intimacy between Garland and Walker, which he charts with great delicacy. The body language of two strangers falling in love has rarely been evoked with such precision and sympathy. It's a "visual effect" which, more often than not, trumps cinematic style.
The sound-stage recreation of the train station is spectacular, consistent with its crucial role in the drama, as is the recreation of the subway stations where the lead characters lose each other, in a brilliantly shot and choreographed passage.
Citizen Kane, made just a few years earlier, contains this same mixture of spatially seductive choreography on sets and relatively alienating process photography. In Kane, the mixture is weighted towards the former, in The Clock towards the latter, though Minnelli demonstrates his mastery by reserving the "set" pieces for passages where he really needs them -- where a visceral appreciation of the space the characters inhabit is crucial to the emotional effect of the scenes.
But there are moments when the process photography undercuts the emotional effect -- as in the scene where Walker runs after Garland on the bus. It's a cute gag played against process screens -- it would have been heart-stopping played on a practical set or a real location.
THE CONTEXT
"Glamorizing virtue" was part of the commercial calculation of Hollywood, especially at MGM, where studio boss Louis B. Mayer insisted that MGM films promote "family values". These were values that Mayer touted but did not practice. In middle age he dumped his aging spouse for a more glamorous trophy wife. He treated his stars like farm animals -- pampered farm animals, admittedly, ones he expected to win him blue ribbons at the county fair.
Mayer copped feels from the teen-aged Garland at every opportunity, even though he wasn't especially attracted to her -- he was just exercising the greengrocer's prerogative to squeeze the produce. MGM plied Garland with amphetamines when her work load slowed her down, then "graciously" paid for her rehab when she crashed, hoping they could still get some more mileage out of her.
This sort of hypocrisy is visible in many of the sentimental films made at MGM -- like the wildly popular Andy Hardy series, made for peanuts and consistently profitable for almost a decade. Mayer loved these films, but seen today they reek of calculation and exploitation. All their sentiment seems not only contrived but downright cynical. The films do have their moments -- the homespun virtues they celebrate are intrinsically attractive -- and if you're in the right mood they can get to you. More often you're keenly aware of being manipulated by shrewd hacks.
Arthur Freed, who produced The Clock, and most of MGM's great musicals, was hardly a saint, and is reported to have had recourse to the casting couch at MGM on occasion, but he was devoted to his family throughout his life, and he imbued everything he worked on with genuine feeling -- contrived, certainly, engineered with old-fashioned theatrical calculation, but never cynical, even for a moment. His films could be corny, way too obvious and even clumsy in their appeal to the heart, but you never get a sense that the artists who made them are trying to put something over on you they don't believe in themselves.
Freed's sincerity is what elevated films like The Clock and Meet Me In St. Louis above the sort of saccharine platitudes found in the Andy Hardy series. One can say for Mayer that he recognized the real thing when he saw it and backed Freed to the hilt as a producer, even when the other great minds on the lot dismissed Freed's stories as simple-minded. Freed rewarded Mayer's faith with sublime works of art which also made money -- with films which now constitute the core of Mayer's legacy. Without Freed, that legacy would consist mostly of clever junk like Love Finds Andy Hardy, which plays today like a mediocre, padded-out sitcom.
Monday, June 9
MUSIC, DANCE, CINEMA -- Part Three, BABES IN ARMS
by
Lloydville
on Mon 09 Jun 2008 08:27 AM PDT
Babes In Arms was Arthur Freed's first solo effort as a producer. He'd worked as an unbilled assistant producer on The Wizard Of Oz, and even though that film hadn't been a smash hit on its initial release, Louis B. Mayer had great faith in Freed's judgment. Freed was one of Mayer's few genuine friends at MGM, with a standing invitation to breakfast at Mayer's home. When Freed told Mayer he wanted to make a film showcasing Judy Garland in a more conventional musical than The Wizard, Mayer gave him his head.
Babes had a relatively low budget but earned a fortune -- it was far more profitable for MGM in the short term than The Wizard had been. Babes was based on a Broadway musical with songs by Rogers and Hart, but Freed dropped several of the numbers from the stage production and added new ones by other composers. He also radically reworked the plot. The changes he made offer a clue to Freed's vision for the Hollywood musical at the very start of his producing career.
The Broadway show concerned a bunch of kids, the sons and daughters of old vaudevillians, who decide to put on a show to help out their parents, who are going through some hard times. The parents don't appear in the stage version, but they are prominent in the film -- featured in a long prologue in which we watch the decline of vaudeville in the early decades of the 20th Century and its virtual demise with the advent of talking pictures.
Freed, a very successful songwriter, had cut his teeth in the vaudeville era, working for a time as an accompanist in the Catskills, and obviously loved the vaudeville traditions very deeply. In Babes, the story of a new generation of performers who revive their parents' Golden Age, he clearly saw a metaphor for what he wanted to do at MGM -- keep those old traditions alive in a contemporary medium. Almost all of his films are imbued with a nostalgia for the theater of his youth, for a magic which he could not believe was really past and gone.
Babes contains loving recreations of routines from the old minstrel tradition, enacted by teenagers, which are saved from bad taste by the affection the filmmakers and performers obviously feel for the pure theatrical genius of the form. In Strike Up the Band, Freed's follow-up to Babes, also starring Garland and Mickey Rooney, there's a good-natured send-up of Victorian melodrama.
Love of theatrical tradition, and a determination to honor it, are key emotional components of these films. But there's also a canny sense that the tradition had to be revivified, translated into dazzling cinematic terms. Freed hired Busby Berkeley to direct the Garland-Rooney musicals. Berkeley was a Broadway choreographer before he came to movies, but he was also a cinematic visionary, who expanded the stage aesthetic into realms that only the camera could explore. Long takes recording complex choreography, swooping crane shots, stage sets that opened up to fantastic proportions were central elements of his style.
A short time later, Freed brought Vincente Minnelli to MGM and championed his career as a movie director. Minnelli had also started out on Broadway, as a director, and like Berkeley had a vision of presenting stage spectacle on film in intrinsically cinematic terms. Minnelli had a more elegant touch than Berkeley, and also got along better with Judy Garland -- so much so that the two eventually got married -- and he became Freed's preferred director for musicals.
Still, as early as Babes In Arms, Freed's emotional and aesthetic ambitions are clear. Like Orson Welles, Freed transformed a profound love of theater into radical cinematic experiments that would convey theatrical effects in the language of movies, that would make old theatrical forms live again on the screen. It was a paradoxical ambition, but it paid off -- it led both men to expand the boundaries of cinematic expression in unique and thrilling ways.
Thursday, June 5
MUSIC, DANCE, CINEMA - Part Two, THE WIZARD OF OZ
by
Lloydville
on Thu 05 Jun 2008 03:11 AM PDT
Walt Disney's Snow White, Hollywood first animated feature-length film, was released in 1937 and was a big hit. Its success was part of MGM's motivation for putting The Wizard Of Oz into production a year later. It's instructive to look at the two films together because, while both are fantasies aimed at a family market, kids and adults, they inhabit radically different aesthetic universes.
It's not just that one is animated and one is live-action. Snow White enchants us by transporting us into a coherent fantasy universe. The Wizard Of Oz enchants us by transporting us into sound stages in Hollywood, USA. Snow White is pure cinema. The Wizard Of Oz is what André Bazin would call mixed cinema -- cinema which derives from the theater and transposes the methods of theater into cinematic terms.
In a certain sense The Wizard Of Oz is about theater, almost a metaphor for the magic of theater. It reminds us constantly of its theatrical nature, to the same degree that Snow White tries to make us forget that it's made up of thousands of two-dimensional drawings. Disney's artists wanted to so dazzle the eye that audiences would read the world of Snow White as a real place. Those who made The Wizard Of Oz wanted to dazzle us, too, while showing us the man behind the curtain, operating the machinery of the illusion -- they wanted us to appreciate the magic of his skills in spite of being let in on the gag.
The Wizard Of Oz gets its juice from the tension inherent in any theatrical illusion -- our willingness to be fooled, our love of believing in something we know to be humbug. Once we accept the basis of the illusion in Snow White, animated drawings, we can afford to forget it, to surrender to the visions it delivers. But The Wizard Of Oz will not let us forget its essential artificiality. The ruler of Oz is, at heart, a medicine-show hustler. Dorothy's friends and protectors are vaudeville headliners, their heroism is the heroism of inspired shtick, honed and perfected in a lifetime of playing tough rooms.
The sets of Oz look like sets, built in front of obviously painted backdrops. Even the matte paintings, combined with live action by an optical process, have a stylized, painterly quality, evoking the painted backdrops of the stage. Contrast this strategy with the strategy of a modern "live-action" fantasy like The Lord Of the Rings, where Peter Jackson uses every resource of modern technology to convince us that his environments are real places in an unreal world.
The Wizard Of Oz is a celebration of the resources of a movie sound stage, of real people in real spaces on Washington Boulevard in Culver City, California, of virtuosos who have spared no effort or cost to take our breath away. This is not by any means anti-cinematic. As Bazin argues in his two brilliant essays on theater and cinema, when movies seek to evoke theatrical effects in cinematic terms they must call upon their subtlest and most powerful means.
In Snow White, Disney takes us into the heart of the fairytale universe. In The Lord Of the Rings, Peter Jackson takes us into the heart of Middle Earth. In The Wizard Of Oz, MGM takes us into the heart of a Hollywood studio of 1939 . . . and shows us that it is no less fantastic a place than "once upon a time" or Mordor. Bazin says that when we watch live theater we never entirely forget the backstage machinery that makes its illusions possible -- we agree to discount it conceptually for the purposes of the play. So it is with The Wizard Of Oz. We agree to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, but we never forget that he's there, and we love the genius and generosity of his sublime hokum.
Both Mervyn LeRoy, the producer of The Wizard Of Oz, and Arthur Freed, his unbilled assistant, took credit in later years for talking MGM into doing the film. Whatever the case, Freed's sensibility is stamped all over the production. Freed was a song lyricist at MGM who dreamed of becoming a producer. Oz was his try-out and he took a pay cut to get the shot. The film was a collective effort, going through fourteen writers and four directors before it was done, but the film's songwriters, Harold Arlen and E. Y. "Yip" Harburg, were part of the production almost from the start, and Harburg had a lot of input on the script. It was Freed who selected Arlen and Harburg for the assignment.
Arlen (above) and Harburg wrote all the songs in the movie and the songs were closely integrated into the story, playing a crucial role in revealing character and advancing the plot. That kind of involvement by songwriters was very rare in Hollywood musicals of the time, when studios would buy Broadway hits and replace numbers in them at will. Numbers were just that, and little more -- excuses for a star turn, or a chance to promote songs owned by MGM.
It was the Freed Unit at MGM which changed all that, eventually, and Freed's rapturous sentiment about the theater, and especially the world of vaudeville where he cut his teeth, was always central to his vision throughout his subsequent years as MGM's premier producer of musicals. The sensibility of the Freed Unit was in place already in The Wizard Of Oz, whether Freed put it there or found it there, and received an even clearer expression in the next film he worked on, Babes In Arms, starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland -- Freed's first assignment as full-on producer.
Babes In Arms was a surprise hit -- it cost much less and made much more than The Wizard Of Oz, at least on its initial release. Its success paved the way for Freed's producing career at MGM. In a future post I'll take a look at Babes In Arms and its underlying themes, which offer essential insights into Freed's art.
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