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Thursday, July 31
EVERY LITTLE MOVEMENT (HAS A MEANING ALL ITS OWN)
by
Lloydville
on Thu 31 Jul 2008 12:19 AM PDT
"Every Little Movement" is a wonderful song from a wonderful scene in a less than wonderful movie, Presenting Lily Mars. The movie was an early Judy Garland musical not produced by Arthur Freed. In it, Judy plays one of her first grown-up romantic leads, opposite Van Heflin. She actually starts out as a lovesick teen, which is what she'd usually played in films up to that time, but becomes a mature woman in the course of the story.
Her character, Lily Mars, is a stage-struck kid who follows a Broadway producer she's met in her home town to New York, looking for a break. Unable to get an interview with the guy, and with no place to stay in the big city, she falls asleep in the orchestra pit of a theater where the producer is rehearsing a show.
She's awakened by an elderly cleaning lady, played by Connie Gilchrist, who tells her not to lose heart and reveals that she was once a leading player on the stage herself. She says she's happy to clean the stage, just to stay a part of the theater. "There was a song," she says, reminiscing, "and it got to be my song" -- and she sings it for Judy up on the stage, eventually doing a simple little dance to go along with it. (Her vocal was dubbed by Mary Kent.) The song was written in 1910 by Karl Hoschna, with lyrics by Otto Harbach.
Judy joins in the dance, and adds a harmony part. As expressions of theatrical sentiment and nostalgia for the days of vaudeville go, the scene is moving and powerful. Even though he didn't produce the film, Freed would appeal often in his own musicals to this same sort of sentiment and nostalgia, this almost mystical faith in the eternal spirit of show business.
The scene is also notable as an expression of professional solidarity between two women of different generations, a gift of empowerment from the older woman and an endorsement of self-reliance. She tells Judy not to go back home and marry her high-school sweetheart but to follow her dream. The quality of the performance of the song gives the scene its dramatic truth, convincing us that the cleaning lady could indeed have been a star in her day, and that Lily might become one in hers. The unabashed emotion of the song, and the affectionate way the two women relate to each other while they sing it, lifts the moment out of the realm of the intellectual and political and makes it emblematic of a genuine, practical, everyday sort of feminism.
You just don't see stuff like this in modern movies, for all their rote celebrations of sisterhood. That fact is in itself an indictment of contemporary popular cinema as a conveyor of humane values.
It's worth watching Presenting Lily Mars just for this scene and this song alone.
Wednesday, July 30
LUCILLE BREMER IN LA PAZ
by
Lloydville
on Wed 30 Jul 2008 12:28 AM PDT
She gained movie immortality in her first film, playing Rose Smith, Judy Garland's older sister, in Meet Me In St. Louis. The next year she danced with Fred Astaire in Yolanda and the Thief, and when that film proved to be a flop, her career took a precipitous downward turn.
She danced with Astaire again in the movie musical revue Ziegfeld Follies, adorned the cover of Life magazine in 1946 and had a supporting role in Till the Clouds Roll By the same year, but MGM gave up on her after that, loaning her out to poverty-row studios for parts in negligible films.
She threw in the towel soon afterward, married the son of a former President of Mexico and went to live with him in La Paz, Baja California, until their divorce in 1963.
Bremer had been a Rockette and a Broadway chorus girl before moving to Los Angeles. She was spotted by Arthur Freed dancing in a show at the Versailles nightclub, given a screen test and almost immediately cast in Meet Me In St. Louis, which Freed produced. She is often referred to as a "protégée" of Freed, and one of Judy Garland's biographers says she was sleeping with him, which might account for her meteoric rise at MGM. I hate to think of her sleeping with Freed, a married man, while they were making Meet Me In St. Louis, that heartfelt paean to family values, but Hollywood is Hollywood.
I don't know what accounted for her meteoric fall. She was a good actress and a talented dancer, but I wouldn't say she had star quality, and in Till the Clouds Roll By she sometimes looks haggard, worn out at 29. Of course Garland was burnt out at an even younger age -- MGM had that effect on some people.
It's a strange and sad tale, except for the part about La Paz, one of my favorite places on earth. I like to think of Rose Smith strolling along the malecón there, of an evening, enjoying the breeze off the Mar de Cortes, far from the intrigues of Culver City.
[Image above © 2007 Harry Rossi]
Tuesday, July 29
MGM MUSICALS IN THE 1930s
by
Lloydville
on Tue 29 Jul 2008 01:02 AM PDT
Even though MGM made the first real movie musical, The Broadway Melody, in 1929, and even though that film was a huge success, the studio spent the rest of the 1930s playing catch-up with other studios as far as musicals went.
Like the rest of Hollywood, MGM was taken by surprise when the musical fell suddenly out of favor with audiences in 1931, and that year it abandoned a big musical shot in two-strip Technicolor partway into production. The musical form was revived in 1933 with the movies made at Warners featuring the surreal production numbers of Busby Berkeley, and it was given further impetus by the Astaire-Rogers films made at RKO, but MGM struggled to find a house style or a house franchise to compete with those of its rival studios.
It capitalized on the name of its first big musical hit, and the film's popular title song, with a series of Broadway Melody musicals, starting with The Broadway Melody Of 1936. It made the musical super-production The Great Ziegfeld in 1936, which was a big critical and commercial hit but didn't really establish a franchise, though the studio later produced a couple of films, Ziegfeld Girl and Ziegfeld Follies, whose titles and content referenced the earlier blockbuster.
MGM did create a somewhat specialized musical franchise in the form of operettas during the 1930s, many of them starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. These were enormously popular films but operettas had essentially played themselves out with audiences by the end of the 1930s. Attempts to revive the form with Mario Lanza in the late 40s and early 50s met with mixed success.
Eleanor Powell was the studio's big conventional musical star throughout the 1930s, though her magical brand of tapping wasn't really suited to romantic pas de deux. She thus never became part of a signature dance team, being usually paired up with the studio's up-and-coming, non-musical leading men, like Robert Taylor and Jimmy Stewart. She had other limitations as a musical star. She wasn't a great singer -- her vocals were almost always dubbed -- and she didn't have great range as an actress. She made one film featuring some magical dance numbers with Fred Astaire, The Broadway Melody of 1940, but for some reason the two were never teamed up again and the film became the last of the Broadway Melody series. Another was planned, to star Powell and Gene Kelly, but it was never made. After that, MGM seemed to lose interest in Powell.
At about the same time it also lost interest in Lucille Ball, whom it had hired away from RKO and tried to establish as a musical leading lady. Ball was a better actress than Powell, with a very appealing screen persona, but she wasn't a great singer, either, and her dance skills were limited to those of an accomplished chorus girl, which is how she'd started out in show business.
One reason for the neglect of both these ladies was the rise of Judy Garland as a star. After her wonderful performance in The Wizard Of Oz, Arthur Freed, making his debut as a producer, teamed her up with Mickey Rooney in a series of musicals that went through the roof at the box office. Finally MGM had a showcase franchise, based on a boffo musical-romantic team, that almost instantly vaulted MGM into the forefront as a producer of movie musicals. Before that franchise could play itself out, Freed, always looking ahead, had begun casting Garland in more mature roles without Rooney, inaugurating a series of superior and radically innovative musicals that left those of the other studios in the dust.
From here on out the rest of Hollywood was destined to play catch-up with MGM, and the Freed Unit, on the musical front.
Saturday, July 26
AGEE ON MINNELLI
by
Lloydville
on Sat 26 Jul 2008 10:47 PM PDT
Vincente Minnelli's two masterpieces from the 1940s, Meet Me In St. Louis and The Clock, got their most perceptive and flattering contemporary reviews from James Agee, writing under his own name in The Nation and anonymously in Time. These reviews meant a lot to Minnelli and he included quotes from the Time pieces in his autobiography.
Agee was probably the best American writer who ever reviewed movies -- his reviews can be read with pleasure today solely for the excellence of their prose -- but his insights into cinema were oddly circumscribed. Agee was unusually sensitive to passages of visual poetry in movies but in a largely intuitive way. His eye was not precise.
The Clock has several crane shots of great grace and power. Agee noted them with approval and Minnelli says that this was the first time any critic had praised his use of the moving camera, of which he was very proud. But Agee went on to say that the The Clock was "largely boom shot". Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the film is shot against process screens, which virtually precludes, and certainly severely limits, the use of a moving camera. In his autobiography Minnelli observes that neither audiences nor critics of the time ever mentioned this aspect of the film.
What's going on here? I'm guessing that Agee didn't really see The Clock in visual terms except in moments when the visual technique called attention to itself -- as it did, for example, in the final shot of the film, when a camera on a tracked crane starts close on the figure of Judy Garland and then pulls up and back until it loses her in the crowds swirling through a busy train station. It's a breathtaking image -- Agee obviously appreciated it as such, and then apparently "remembered" the film he'd just seen as visually constructed along the same lines.
Part of this can probably be explained by "the enchantment of convention" in an artistic medium. When a spectator is familiar with and accepts a convention like back-screen projection, he or she tends not to notice it consciously, sees it as of a piece with the rest of the film, even though it's clearly a radically different kind of image from one shot on an exterior location or on a three-dimensional set. It's only when a convention is employed in an unusual way -- as the boom shot was employed in the final image of The Clock -- that the spectator becomes aware of it.
This explains the critical notion that Citizen Kane, for example, employed radical new techniques, when in fact almost all of them had been used before, just not so spectacularly and expressively. It also explains why Griffith was for so long given credit for inventing cinematic techniques which predated his work but which Griffith used in exciting new ways for more powerful effects.
But Agee had another limitation as a film critic. He seems to have judged all movies against an ideal kind of film of his own imagination, which was a novelist's imagination. In his own fiction, and much of his non-fiction, Agee tried to evoke transcendent spiritual values through a precise rendering of physical realities. This was why the film medium, founded on photographic reality, appealed so much to him.
Agee could accept expressionism in film, as with the work of the silent clowns he loved so much, when it was based on gags actually performed in real settings, and he could appreciate the pure expressionism of Disney's cartoons, which he saw as a kind of music, because it was divorced from all connection to physical reality. But the high theatricality of the movie musical did not capture his imagination or inspire his analytic gifts.
In his review of Meet Me In St. Louis, he concentrated on the novelistic rendering of what he called the film's "domestic poetry", and complained, for example, that the snowmen which Tootie smashes didn't look real -- as if anything in Minnelli's movie looks real by documentary standards. Agee comments on the pleasant nature of many of the songs in the film without seeming to see the ways they serve and advance the drama as integrated elements of the whole work.
In some ways, Agee was an amateur of movies, but an amateur of genius. Even though he later wrote film scripts in a professional capacity, he remained at heart a member of the audience -- often in thrall to the enchantment of convention and often projecting his own artistic and emotional values into films, rather than trying to read them on their own terms.
Agee was, all the same, a great critic, to my mind the greatest American movie critic, because his writing stimulates excitement and thought about cinema, and a passionate conviction that it could be more than it usually is or tries to be.
Wednesday, July 23
THE BROADWAY MELODY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 23 Jul 2008 08:45 PM PDT
In 1929, two years after The Jazz Singer, MGM made the first film that could fairly be called a musical, The Broadway Melody. Other talking and part-talking films had featured musical numbers, but The Broadway Melody had a book and a fully integrated musical program. It was a backstage musical about a successful New York songwriter and two sisters from the provinces who're trying to make it on Broadway. Most of the musical performances are logically motivated by the theatrical story, but sometimes the songwriter starts singing one of his compositions just to express his feelings, with an orchestral accompaniment swelling up behind him on the soundtrack -- which puts us squarely in the fantastical realm of the classic musical.
The film has some delightful songs by the real-life songwriting team of Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, including the title number, which is presented over and over in the film -- four times in the first half hour alone. It's hard to complain about this, since the song is catchy and almost everything else about the production is shabby and second-rate. The lead performers are likable enough, and do a passable job of firing off some quaint contemporary slang, but their singing and dancing are amateurish, as are the bits we see of the Broadway show they're playing in.
The love triangle between the leads is hardly convincing as drama, and verges on the unpleasant, since the hero seems to end up with the wrong girl in the end. The backstage world is presented as a battleground of jealous sniping and general ill-will. This may have passed for a kind of realism in 1929 but it just feels nasty today. The film's locations are confined to cheap-looking interiors recorded with dull proscenium-style camera set-ups. The two girls spend a lot of time dressing and undressing, showing off their lingerie, and either being physically affectionate or wrestling angrily with each other. This gives the film its only erotic charge.
The film was a smash hit with audiences, still enchanted, obviously, by the whole idea of talking pictures, and also won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first sound film so honored. Go figure. MGM must have thought it had discovered, in the movie musical, a gold mine, if material this crummy could sell so many tickets and reap so much critical praise. All of Hollywood soon jumped on the bandwagon and the next two years saw an avalanche of musicals, a number of them shot in two-strip Technicolor, most of which made money. One of them, Gold Diggers Of Broadway, from Warners, made more money than any studio film had ever made, a record it held until 1939.
And then, suddenly, the audience lost interest -- totally. By 1931, the movie musical was all but dead -- so dead that the studios rarely even bothered to keep prints of the ones they'd made. Almost all the musicals made in this era have been lost, or exist only in fragmentary form. Not even Gold Diggers Of Broadway, one of the most successful and important films in Hollywood history, survives in a complete print today.
From the evidence of The Broadway Melody we may not be missing much in artistic terms but it's still a curious lapse in the record of American popular taste and of the Hollywood musical. The form was reborn, however, in 1933, due almost entirely to the surreal production-number spectacles concocted by Busby Berkeley. Not long afterward Astaire and Rogers, with their wildly successful dance films for RKO, established the movie musical as a permanent fixture in studio-era Hollywood. And Arthur Freed, who had, with his songs, contributed the only really enduring delights to The Broadway Melody, the first Hollywood musical, would, as a producer, elevate the form to undreamed of heights in the 1940s and 1950s.
It's all a most improbable saga.
Tuesday, July 22
THE BIG TRAIL
by
Lloydville
on Tue 22 Jul 2008 01:24 PM PDT
In the whole history of cinema there is no greater feast for the eye than Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail, from 1930. It cost something approaching $100 million in today's dollars -- though in truth it probably couldn't be made today, without CGI, for less than $300 million -- and Walsh put all of the budget on screen, creating an epic vision of a wagon train's journey from the banks of the Mississippi to the Pacific coast. It was shot in a standard 35mm format and in a 65mm wide-screen version, which has recently become available on DVD for the first time.
Because so few theaters were willing or able to refit to show the 65mm version, and because the film was not a hit, Hollywood abandoned the wide-screen format until the 1950s, when it was taken up again in response to the threat from television. So The Big Trail remained a costly experiment gone awry -- but it hardly plays as an experimental work today. Walsh's composition for the wide screen is as elegant and accomplished as any in the later history of the format -- it bears favorable comparison with the best wide-screen work of John Ford or David Lean.
As a film shot almost entirely on location, it also bears comparison with Greed and Ford's The Iron Horse for its pictorial realism, which is downright breathtaking.
That's the good news. The bad news is that the script for this early talkie is marred by stilted dialogue delivered in a stilted style by almost all the actors, including John Wayne in his first starring role. The location sound is extremely impressive for a film from 1930, but not impressive enough to hold its own with the stunning visuals.
I can say without hesitation, however, that if The Big Trail had been a silent film, it would today be ranked among the greatest movies ever made. If you can look past its limitations as a talkie, you can see the masterpiece it might have been -- the masterpiece that on one level it certainly is.
Ford, who discovered Wayne, is said to have held a grudge against him for making his starring debut in another director's film. I suspect, however, that this was in part displaced resentment against Walsh for creating such magnificent images of the American West, which rivaled and sometimes surpassed those Ford had created in his own silent Westerns. It is perhaps no accident that Ford abandoned Westerns entirely during most of the 1930s, returning to the form only in 1939, with Stagecoach . . . and I'm tempted to suggest that Ford spent the rest of his career as a maker of Westerns trying (successfully) to live up to the visual poetry of Walsh's The Big Trail.
Monday, July 21
THE GREAT ZIEGFELD
by
Lloydville
on Mon 21 Jul 2008 01:55 PM PDT
This movie is a great mystery. It has a less-than-compelling plot, tiresome dialogue and an excruciatingly slow pace, which makes its three-hour running time seem twice as long. Yet it was a big hit in 1936 and won the Academy Award for best picture.
What did audiences of the time like about this sprawling cavalcade of mediocrity? Nostalgia for a passing tradition of show business must have played a part. The movie charts the rise of Florenz Ziegfeld from midway showman to Broadway king, the inventor of a kind of glitzy, super-sized variety show that represented the apotheosis of vaudeville. Vaudeville had pretty much died out by 1936, given the coup de grace by talking pictures, and people must have missed it already -- realized that something precious from their youth had vanished from the American scene.
Arthur Freed, when he started his producing career at MGM a few years after The Great Ziegfeld, mined this mood of nostalgia often in the musicals he made for the studio.
The Great Ziegfeld also has some stunning cinematic passages in which it "recreates" numbers from Ziegfeld's shows. These involve bizarre moving sets of great size and intricacy, often filmed in long, elegant tracking shots from swooping cranes. They don't have much emotional impact, since they don't have much to do with the drama, and they lack the deranged energy and inventiveness of Busby Berkeley's big production numbers, but they're still amazing feats of filmmaking.
The best moments of the film are those few in which Fanny Brice does a brief cameo turn. She was really something -- kind of like a female Jerry Lewis with sharper timing and a sweeter temperament -- and it's a shame she never found movie vehicles that could better showcase her appealing comic persona.
Add it all up and you have the formula for a box-office and critical success in 1936. Today, the film is little more than a curiosity -- a record of popular appetites that would be fed by greater artists in the years to come, when the Freed Unit at MGM kicked into high gear.
Sunday, July 20
FRAMES
by
Lloydville
on Sun 20 Jul 2008 01:10 PM PDT
This is the seventh in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin . . .
In an article on film and painting, André Bazin argues that the frame around a painting has the purpose of cutting it off from the real world, establishing the limits of a conceptual field necessary to analyzing the painting in its own terms . . . while the frame around a cinematic image is not a boundary marker but merely a masking device, blocking out an infinite expanse of space which we are meant to imagine as existing outside the mask.
This doesn't seem quite right to me. There are certain kinds of painting which evoke the world with an optical integrity, an über-photographic reality, which make it not only possible but desirable to imagine a universe beyond their frames. Much Victorian academic painting has this nature -- it was a quality of painting which modernism rejected but which still had its virtues. Some "classical" painters used this quality -- Vermeer, for example. The conceptual universe of Vermeer's paintings does not end at the edges of his frames.
And the frame of a cinematic image is often much more than a mask -- a device for focusing attention. It sets the boundaries for creating a drama of space, exactly as the proscenium arch does in classical ballet. The distance or nearness of two dancers in a ballet only has dramatic meaning in relation to the space defined by the proscenium arch. In ballet, the frame of this arch doesn't just demarcate an arena of theatrical illusion -- distancing it from the real world inhabited by the spectator -- it has a functional role in defining the expressive terms of the dance.
It's true that in photographed cinema, as opposed to animation, say, we can readily imagine a world beyond the frame with the same ontology as the actual objects photographed within the frame, but there is a counter impulse to discount this peripheral world in order to read the space within the frame as a theatrical arena whose dramatic content only makes sense within that frame.
Take the scene in The Searchers, for example, when Debbie appears in the far distance on top of a ridge behind Nathan and slowly moves towards and into the foreground space they occupy. This becomes a visceral objective correlative to Nathan's dawning acceptance of Debbie as an individual human being, not just a symbol of his sense of disenfranchisement as a man, an object for the vengeance he wants to visit on life.
The shot is an image of a real place in a real moment of time, but we cannot imagine the world beyond its frame, we cannot imagine the space as seen from Debbie's perspective, for example, and still experience the full meaning of the shot. The frame here acts as a frame does with most paintings -- it creates a conceptual field distinct from the world beyond its borders, and only within that conceptual field does the shot "work".
Bazin's formula is just too simple. In the paintings Alma-Tadema did of the ancient world, we feel that the frame is indeed just a mask -- a window onto a whole lost world beyond its frame which we delight in imagining. And conversely, when we are swept into the space of a great animated cartoon, it's hardly necessary to seriously imagine a whole cartoon universe beyond its frame.
We can imagine such a universe beyond the cartoon frame, just as we can, with much less effort, imagine a world beyond the ridge Debbie appears on, but it's the way the frame limits such images, takes them out of the larger world, that makes their meaning in purely cinematic terms possible.
Here again, I think it's Bazin's location of cinema's power in photographed reality, rather than in the drama of space, that leads him to a deficient theoretical proposition.
Monday, July 14
THE LUBITSCH MUSICAL
by
Lloydville
on Mon 14 Jul 2008 04:53 AM PDT
You can comb through the silent films Ernst Lubitsch made in Germany searching for the fabled "Lubitsch touch" and you'll hardly find a trace of it. He made a few elegant historical spectacles and a lot of very silly comedies, though they're silly in an elegant way. Their tone is reminiscent of the Offenbach operettas, whose farce plots are so outrageously daft that they set off the sweet melodies (with their daft lyrics) perfectly. Lubitsch didn't have such melodies to work with in his silent films, of course, but he used mise en scène in their place -- he could send his actors off in preposterously choreographed evolutions that made his images sing.
It was when Lubitsch came to Hollywood that his "touch" was born. Probably under the influence of Chaplin's A Woman Of Paris, he began making far more sophisticated comedies, bittersweet and adult, with that subtle indirection of narrative that people came to recognize as his signature style. His masterpiece in this style was The Marriage Circle, a wry, complicated, rueful, generous look at the delusions of romance, at the delicate improvisations of marriage.
Then sound came in and Lubitsch realized that, with the aid of music and song, he could return to the style of his silent farces, that he could be wildly silly again -- and that's just what he did. The silliness soared to sublime new heights, however, because the "touch" he'd developed allowed him to create a lighter-than-air world on screen where every moment had the quality of music.
The actual music in these films was not, sadly, on a par with Offenbach's-- it was usually a sort of pale imitation of it -- and this led to a curious imbalance. The elegance of Lubitsch's choreography, his visual wit, the charm of his players was often dragged down by uninspired patter songs sung in a vaguely operatic style. He could provide an ironic visual counterpoint to these dull songs, and that could be very funny, but he had few chances to lift the musical numbers into transcendent realms, because the music just wasn't good enough.
The Lubitsch musical became a kind of dead end. Its lighthearted tone found more favor when expressed in uniquely American terms -- in Astaire's dancing, for example, and in the pop songs of the great Broadway composers. Those who still longed for the middle-brow European sophistication of the Lubitsch musical preferred to take it in straight doses -- in screen operettas, the most popular of which starred Jeanette MacDonald, who had been Lubitsch's leading lady in many of his early musicals at Paramount.
But nothing was ever again quite like the Lubitsch musical. Only Minnelli's musicals made for the Freed Unit at MGM developed a coherent visual style out of which song and dance numbers could flow gracefully, but Minnelli had a heavy hand compared to Lubitsch, whose touch was gossamer. Lubitsch hardly ever found musical material suited to that touch. He needed gossamer music like that churned out on a regular basis by Offenbach, "the Mozart of the Champs Elysées" -- which I guess is a roundabout way of saying that, visually, Lubitsch was the Mozart of Melrose Avenue.
Friday, July 11
YOU AND I AND MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS
by
Lloydville
on Fri 11 Jul 2008 01:02 AM PDT
Meet Me In St. Louis may be the greatest movie ever damned by an unending chorus of faint and elaborately qualified praise. Its frank appeal to sentiment and its view of the everyday domestic sphere as an arena of profound import could not be more out of critical fashion. Aljean Harmetz, in her wonderful book about the making of The Wizard Of Oz, puts it this way: "Meet Me In St. Louis . . . is almost embarrassing to watch today with its wholesome sentimentality capped by a tooth-decaying performance by seven-year-old Margaret O'Brien." (In fact, O'Brien's performances is one of the most extraordinary in the history of cinema.)
The problem is that Meet Me In St. Louis is the story of a functional family -- a concept which modern critics simply don't have the intellectual tools to engage. They're like art critics who are physically repulsed by the color brown trying to write sensibly about Rembrandt.
The core of the film to me is a scene of family crisis in which all the other members turn against the father, unite in opposition to him, for actions they see as oppressive and destructive. So far so good -- this is a scene of family dysfunction and patriarchal tyranny which is a convention of modern drama and which many of us probably know well from personal experience.
But then something strange happens. There is an intervention of grace. The mother joins the isolated father in the parlor, sits at the piano and begins playing a song -- one they used to sing at the beginning of their relationship. The father sings the words to it, in an unprofessional voice but with a straining effort to make it sweet. In the final chorus, the mother joins in, adding a harmony part.
The sound of this has drawn all the other members of the household back to the parlor. The crisis remains but the rancor has dispersed. The image of the bond between the parents has banished the terrifying specter of the family's emotional dissolution.
The song the parents sing, "You and I", sounds like an old standard from the period the film is set in, around the turn of the last century, but it was written in 1944, the year the film was made, with lyrics by the film's producer, Arthur Freed, and music by his long-time collaborator Nacio Herb Brown. (That's Freed at the piano in the picture above, with Brown taking notes, in an earlier period of their songwriting career.) The actor playing the father didn't have a good enough voice to sing the song, but the filmmakers didn't want a voice that sounded too slick, too professional -- so Freed sang it himself, voicing the actor in a simple, pleasing, earnest way.
It's remarkable the lengths to which critics have gone to avoid dealing with the emotional and psychological meaning of this scene. Describing it in the BFI monograph on the film, Gerald Kauffman says that the mother "forces" the family to accept the father's actions, ignoring the fact that she doesn't address any of them directly and that they have not accepted the father's actions. In his chapter on Meet Me In St. Louis in The Films Of Vincente Minnelli, James Naremore quotes with apparent approval the critic George Toles's observation that the children's return to the parlor is so beautifully choreographed that it's clear Minnelli cares more for the "pictorial" elements of the scene than for its emotional undercurrents.
Toles goes on to describe the children's return as a function of "prescience" -- rather than curiosity about and emotional attraction to the novelty of hearing their parents harmonizing at the piano. Toles seems to have abandoned reason entirely here, not least in failing to recognize that the "pictorial" and choreographic elements in a cinematic musical constitute, along with the songs, its primary means of conveying emotion.
Critical embarrassment notwithstanding, Meet Me In St. Louis remains Freed's masterpiece -- it speaks and sings with his voice, in this case quite literally. Take a look at it again sometime, and if you find it embarrassing to watch -- get over it.
Thursday, July 10
THE GERSHWIN CROWD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 10 Jul 2008 12:21 AM PDT
George Gershwin had an enormous influence on American popular culture, both directly, through his music, and indirectly through the circle of artists which formed around him and his brother Ira in New York and in Hollywood. This circle had a formal center in the ongoing open-house salon presided over by Ira's wife Lenore. Not only was their home a social center, a gathering place for artists the Gershwins admired -- and not just musical artists -- but Lenore (called Lee by her friends) was a kind of fixer, a matchmaker for artistic collaborations of all sorts.
In his autobiography, Vincente Minnelli -- seen above, with Arthur Freed at the piano -- tells how he was adopted by the Gershwins when he started to make a name for himself as a designer of shows at Radio City Music Hall. In time, Lee would put him together with the Schuberts, who were looking for a classy designer and director for one of their productions. That was how Minnelli made the jump to Broadway. Arthur Freed, who lured Minnelli to Hollywood, had also been part of the Gershwin crowd from his earliest days as a songwriter.
George Gershwin inspired several generations of artists who wanted to elevate the standards of American popular art. Gershwin had made the jump from Tin Pan Alley to the concert hall, from Broadway musicals to a new kind of American opera -- he offered proof that horizons could be expanded, that popular art could be art of the highest order.
[Image © Al Hirschfeld]
Even Gershwin's mainstream commercial work attracted the best of the best. Consider the opening night of Girl Crazy on Broadway, in 1930. This was one of George and Ira's most popular Broadway musicals, with a program of songs that still dazzles the imagination -- everything from "I Got Rhythm" to "Embraceable You." Ginger Rogers became a star that night, singing the latter song. Fred Astaire had been called in on an informal basis to offer some help with one of Rogers's dances -- the first time the two had worked together. Rogers would of course go on with Astaire, a close friend of George's, to expand the expressive range of the Hollywood musical, of American popular dance, in unprecedented ways. (Ethel Merman became a star at this premiere, too, singing "I Got Rhythm", though one can't quite claim for her the same sort of influence on American popular culture.)
In the pit orchestra that night, Roger Edens sat at the piano. He would later become Judy Garland's principal arranger and vocal coach at MGM, turning her from a kid novelty act ("the little girl with the great big voice") into one of the most brilliant interpreters of American popular song. Edens would end up serving as Arthur Freed's right-hand man in the Freed Unit at MGM, helping to create a series of movie musicals that revolutionized the form. Edens, working in various capacities, often uncredited, was the man most responsible for the high musical standards set by the Freed films.
Also playing in the pit that night were Glenn Miller, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman (above, some years later), Jack Teagarden and Gene Krupa -- a virtual who's who of the big band swing movement that would soon sweep the nation. George Gershwin himself conducted the ensemble.
In truth, it's hard to find important figures in American popular art from the 1930s through the 1950s who didn't number at one time, in some capacity, among the Gershwin crowd. One could almost go so far as to say that if a bomb had gone off in the Alvin Theater on 14 October 1930, leveling the place just before the curtain went up on Girl Crazy, America would be a very different country than it is today. And this begs the question of what American culture might have been if George Gershwin hadn't died of a brain tumor in 1937, at the age of 38.
After
George's death, Ira and Lee's home in Hollywood continued to be an haven for
creative types -- mostly members of the old New York gang who'd come west. When Minnelli, Freed and Edens made An American In Paris in 1952, they were still trying to live up to the standards set by George Gershwin, to honor and do justice to his legacy. Almost every musician who worked on the film argued over whether or not the new arrangements of the Gershwin songs captured the spirit of George's work. They were all still members in good standing of the Gershwin crowd.
Sunday, July 6
THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL
by
Lloydville
on Sun 06 Jul 2008 12:05 AM PDT
The Bad and the Beautiful is sometimes called a film noir but it's nothing of the sort -- it's a romantic soap opera whose stylistic "darkness" is purely aesthetic and whose thematic "darkness" derives from simple perversity. A true film noir presents the image of a morally chaotic universe, a universe in which moral choices are either unclear or existentially useless -- The Bad and the Beautiful glamorizes evil and asks us to love it.
The Bad and the Beautiful is the only film ever made about Hollywood which manages to capture its peculiar culture of perversity. Hollywood, in the classic studio era, was not about money. Given the fact that the major studios had a virtual monopoly over film distribution, money was a given. Movies were a rigged game. It wasn't about power, either -- power was also a given, a consequence of all that money. And it wasn't about sex -- money and power guaranteed sex, not only for the beautiful people who paraded their wares in front of a camera but for the nerdy little businessmen who organized the parade.
The coin of the realm in Hollywood was brutality and betrayal . The ability to hurt other people, especially one's friends and allies, with impunity was the one entitlement that signified genuine status in Hollywood. It was the only behavior that had a lasting and enduring glamor there.
The Bad and the Beautiful is about (and also part and parcel of) the sentimental myth created in Hollywood to lend a romantic flavor to the puerile exercise of brutality and betrayal -- by insisting that it was all for art, for the good of the picture, for the good of the public. This myth was meant to disguise the fact that brutality and betrayal had an erotic charge in Hollywood, that it constituted a kind of moral pornography -- that it existed for its own sake.
In a world of total material and sensual satiation, moral perversity was the only thing still capable of delivering a charge. It was the sort of charge that attaches to a child killing an insect or a small animal, to high school kids tormenting an outsider into suicidal despair, to the enslavement and torture and destruction of helpless people by governments.
Simone Weil wrote, "Brutality,
violence, and inhumanity have an immense prestige that schoolbooks hide
from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everyone bows
before." This insight is the key to Hollywood's culture, and to The Bad and the Beautiful. For The Bad and the Beautiful is not about money, not about power, not about sex -- not even about filmmaking or Hollywood per se. Its emotional climaxes, its juice, come from moments of lurid, glamorized, unrepentant brutality and betrayal.
One might say the same for most of Greek drama, of course, and much of Shakespeare. The difference is that The Bad and the Beautiful calls down no retribution from Olympus, from the inexorable workings of fate. In Sophocles as in Shakespeare, the frisson of moral perversity is part of the entertainment, but there is a price to be paid. In the perpetual adolescence of Hollywood, so brilliantly evoked in The Bad and the Beautiful, no price is exacted -- except a kind of emptiness, that money and power and celebrity and Oscars can't fill up. There is that kind of emptiness at the heart of The Bad and the Beautiful, but it's not acknowledged. The film is a perfect paradigm of true spiritual despair -- a despair that is unaware of itself.
Friday, July 4
ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR
by
Lloydville
on Fri 04 Jul 2008 12:35 AM PDT
The web log If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger is a new thing under the sun -- a kind of journal of visual culture composed almost entirely of images, with minimal comment. I think of mardecortesbaja as primarily a journal of visual culture, though the commentary has an equal place with the images. But at Charlie Parker it's mostly the images that talk -- to us and, perhaps more importantly, to each other. The result is a sort of subliminal conversation that too much interpretation would drown out.
Tom Sutpen, one of the guiding lights at Charlie Parker, has just started a different kind of web log, Illusion Travels By Streetcar, devoted to his writing about film. In the first post, he produces this evocation of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which he jotted down on a legal pad for some writing project he can no longer remember:
Metropolis,
that occult skyscraper of vision piled atop ever more crazed vision; of
fairy tale narrative and futuristic nightmare; of half-buried eroticism
and a mystic symbology lifted, with all the weightless ease of an empty
bottle, from the Old Testament; all in service to a vaguely Socialist
fever dream its director, Fritz Lang, had no real interest in. That
tattered Metropolis, in all of its deranged willfulness and splendor, will almost certainly never be seen in its entirety again.
It's a lovely piece of writing and a fine summary of the film but its last line has taken on a new resonance with the news, only recently reported and now spreading through the Internet like wildfire, that a complete print of Metropolis has been discovered, in a film archive in Buenos Aires. It's a 16mm preservation copy of a battered 35mm original, but it's all there -- the film as Lang originally made it, before it got cut down by its American distributor -- the only known copy of the complete film in existence. (The image above is a frame-grab from the print.)
This is exciting in itself and also for the wild hopes it arouses that other lost footage might someday still be found -- a copy of Von Stroheim's four-hour cut of Greed, for example, or the footage RKO cut from The Magnificent Ambersons.
But enough dreaming. Check out Sutpen's new blog -- I suspect it's going to be essential reading for movie fans.
Thursday, July 3
MEXICO
by
Lloydville
on Thu 03 Jul 2008 12:02 AM PDT
Check out "Mexico", not the James Taylor song of the same name, but a somewhat obscure Elvis track from Fun In Acapulco. Thanks to Tony D'Ambra of the invaluable films noir web site for reminding me of it, in a post about The Big Steal, a prime example of fiesta noir -- a film that starts out noir but goes goofy when it gets south of the border.
Elvis's "Mexico" is a slight bit of material but Elvis makes it fun -- and manages to remind me how much I miss Baja California and La Paz.
Elvis sings the song in the movie -- it can also be found on the soundtrack album and on the two-disc set Command Performances which collects most of the songs from the Elvis movies not included on the various Masters box sets.
Tuesday, July 1
COHERENT SPACES, SEDUCTIVE SPACES
by
Lloydville
on Tue 01 Jul 2008 01:54 PM PDT
The sixth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.
Movies
achieve their highest aesthetic enchantment and greatest power to move
us emotionally by creating the illusion of spaces on the other side of
the screen which we can inhabit imaginatively. It's not the fact
that moving pictures move that moves us, it's the fact that movement is one of the chief ways that spatial illusions are created.
The coherence of the spatial illusion is crucial, not just in
individual shots but in the combination of shots through editing.
Single photographic images have a kind of built-in spatial coherence,
though they can be lit and composed in ways that counteract this
inherent quality -- flattening the image, for example, so that we have
a hard time evaluating the depth of the space recorded. But even
images with spatial depth all shot in a single location can be combined
in such a way as to confuse us about the totality of the space they are
meant to suggest.
Almost any competent director can create the basic illusion of a
coherent space. The simplest way to do this is to follow
what has come to be the standard "studio style" -- to start each scene
in a particular location with a master shot showing the overall space
of the scene and then cut in to closer shots of people or objects
within that scene, whose place in the spatial scheme has already been
established. There are endless variations of this method.
One can open a scene on a close-up of an object or an actor and then cut to a master
shot, but the master shot always serves as the ground of the illusion,
the point of orientation, even if that orientation is delayed.
We would find it very difficult to imaginatively inhabit a scene whose
spatial coherence was impossible or difficult to read -- even if we
could construct it intellectually in our minds based on disparate
visual cues.
But the illusion of spatial coherence is merely the bottom line for
imaginative participation in a cinematic shot or scene. The
greatest, most pleasing and most powerful films create spatial
illusions that seduce us into the imaginary spaces of the work -- which
invite or viscerally compel us into the spatial illusion.
This is where the art of cinema begins, and all great directors have
known how to seduce us in this way. They seem to have come into
possession of this knowledge by instinct, almost to have been born with
it. It doesn't, in other words, seem to be a knowledge that can
be taught, except perhaps by example. We have no language for
analyzing this knowledge systematically.
But there is a system to such seduction. It can be used in
complex and subtle ways to manipulate our emotional involvement in and
reaction to the narrative elements of a film. Allowing us to
enter the illusory space on screen at our own pace, as with a
deep-focus shot in which the choreography of the actors emphasizes the
space slowly and subtly, creates a different emotional effect than
hurtling us into an illusory space by a rapid movement of the camera,
one mounted on the top of a speeding train, for example. A master
shot looking down on the scene has different effect than a master shot
looking straight-on. A master shot which tracks in on a detail or
a character has a different effect than isolating the element with a
cut, and a master shot in which an element moves towards the camera
into a close-up has a different effect again.
Such variations of effect have been part of the crude methods of cinema
from the beginning, and account for the omnipresence of the chase as a
climactic device. Even if it has no logical raison d'etre,
a chase is almost always cathartic -- by creating the illusion of rapid
movement through space the chase reaffirms and satisfies our attraction
to the basic
method and charm of cinema. It creates emotional involvement with
the characters, the pursuer and the pursued, quite beyond any conscious
involvement arising from the dramatic narrative. When Orson
Welles said that every great film was a chase he was acknowledging this
fundamental principal.
But when such visceral involvement is manipulated in complex ways in the service of
dramatic narrative, of character exposition, cinema rises to the level
of great art, an art founded in the creation of coherent and seductive
spatial illusions.
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