"Lloyd, no! No!"
"He told me he was going to wear that costume for Halloween, but I didn't believe him. The fool. The mad fool!"
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Wednesday, October 31
TRICK OR TREAT
by
Lloydville
on Wed 31 Oct 2007 06:41 AM PDT
"Lloyd, no! No!" "He told me he was going to wear that costume for Halloween, but I didn't believe him. The fool. The mad fool!" Tuesday, October 30
A MCGINNIS FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 30 Oct 2007 01:56 AM PDT
 The women on Robert McGinnis' paperback covers were often scantily clad, looking as though they might slip out of whatever they were wearing at any moment, but he also did straight-ahead nudes. The modest parasol here, warding off the sun's gaze, gives this example a certain teasing piquance. Monday, October 29
AMARILLY OF CLOTHESLINE ALLEY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 29 Oct 2007 02:24 AM PDT
 I fell in love with Mary Pickford when I watched this film a few years ago. I know you're probably thinking, "What took you so long?", but I really hadn't seen much of her work before -- some of the Biograph shorts she made for D. W. Griffith and Sparrows, one of her later silents. I liked Sparrows a lot, thought it was a very well-made film, and admired Pickford's craft extravagantly . . . but there was something self-conscious about it, something built into the idea of a masterful artist playing a child, which had the flavor of a brilliant (a really brilliant) stunt. But when I watched Amarilly Of Clothesline Alley all my resistance melted. First of all, Pickford plays a sexually mature female, innocent by choice but well aware of her options -- and she's very sexy, very self-possessed and powerful, which makes her goodness all the more vexing. The whole film is permeated with a strong aura of female power, expressed most poignantly and convincingly in the easy camaraderie between Amarilly and her mother -- you get a sense that there's no problem on earth these two can't solve . . . and haven't solved, in a sense, keeping a fatherless family together in crushing poverty. (You also get a clear echo of Pickford's actual early life, growing up too fast, more of a peer than a daughter to her own mother.) The wry eye they throw on the rest of the world, especially the world of men, delightfully underlined in the snappy intertitles by Frances Marion, their exuberant enjoyment of each other's company, and of life itself, exactly as it is, suggest a whole universe of female self-sufficiency and dominion which our culture has managed to eradicate almost entirely from the mainstream of popular art. (I begin to think that the national euphoria over Pickford's marriage to Douglas Fairbanks may have reflected America's pride, and perhaps relief, that the country managed to produce a man worthy of her.)  The style of the film as a whole, and Pickford's performance in particular, is shockingly casual, fast-paced, breezy and naturalistic -- Amarilly seems to have a whole and real and complicated inner self which she chooses to share with others, and with us, out of sheer generosity and goodwill. Virtue has never seemed so alive, so glamorous. Well, I'm not the first person this has happened to, and thanks to the miracle of DVDs, I won't be the last. Sunday, October 28
DEBORAH KERR
by
Lloydville
on Sun 28 Oct 2007 02:58 AM PDT
 Over at the Alternative Film Guide, Andre Soares has a wonderful appreciation of Deborah Kerr (who died recently at the age of 86) in which he tries to unravel the mystery of her subtle erotic appeal. Such mysteries are ultimately unravel-able, of course, but Soares comes close, and reminds us why Kerr's performances are always so alive and vexing. I've written about her previously in a review of The Sundowners. Saturday, October 27
AN A. E. HOUSMAN POEM FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sat 27 Oct 2007 01:36 AM PDT
It's one of my favorite poems of all time because it looks at things so coldly and reminds us that sincerity is not the highest of virtues. Today we tend to think of virtue as a state of mind -- if you mean well, you're a good person. To Housman, as to the ancient Greeks, virtue was action, pure and simple. Friday, October 26
THE COLDEST WINTER
by
Lloydville
on Fri 26 Oct 2007 02:00 AM PDT
 When he died in a car crash this Spring, David Halberstam had just finished his 21st book, The Coldest Winter, an epic study of the Korean War. It's partly a work of military history, with combat narratives based on interviews with veterans of the conflict, but its greater value lies in the way Halberstam places the war in the context of the post-war world, of American and global politics and strategy. It fills in yet another piece of the puzzle of America's mood after WWII -- dark, anxious, bewildered, unsure of its new role as a world superpower, veering between arrogance and lunatic paranoia. There are many lessons for our own times to be learned from the book -- not least about the ways the Republican party managed to box the Democrats into policies they mistrusted under the threat of being labeled "soft on Communism". Substitute "terrorism" for "Communism" and you will see the same dynamic at work today.  The war in Korea all but wrecked Truman's presidency, but he was confident that history would judge him more kindly than his contemporaries, as indeed it has. Among the high-ranking soldiers and politicians, Matthew Ridgway and Truman emerge in Halberstam's book as the true heroes of the war. Ridgway learned how to fight the Chinese because he was willing to take them seriously, to respect them as soldiers, something the racist high command under MacArthur could not do. Truman was willing to buck popular sentiment and risk political ruin to oppose MacArthur, whose madness served the purposes of the right-wing Republicans in Washington but whose insubordination threatened the very core of the American system of government, the principle of civilian control of the military.  Among the boots on the ground, there were heroes by the thousands, though they got no glory out of it, or even much recognition from the folks at home. Korea was a war Americans wanted to forget, even while it was happening -- which is just the kind of war that needs to be remembered and studied with care. We're in one like it right now -- part of the price a nation pays for forgetting the grievous mistakes it has made in the past. Thursday, October 25
THEME TIME RADIO HOUR
by
Lloydville
on Thu 25 Oct 2007 11:37 AM PDT
 This is a poster designed by Jaime Hernandez, of the awesome comics duo Los Bros Hernandez, for Bob Dylan's great show on XM Satellite Radio, which might be the best radio music show of all time. Each week Dylan plays songs he likes on a given topic. The songs are great, but it's also great to see how Dylan organizes music in his mind. It's much the way he organizes images in his songs -- according to associations and affinities that don't follow conventional rules or categories. I don't listen to the show much because like more and more people these days I have a hard time dealing with scheduled entertainment -- unless it's something live like a baseball game. If it's digital and I can't download it or get a copy of it to enjoy at my leisure, it's too much trouble, too annoying -- too much about the convenience of the provider and not enough about my convenience. [With thanks to Boing Boing for the link.] Wednesday, October 24
A SCHOOLYARD RHYME FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 24 Oct 2007 11:56 AM PDT
 It is in the rock, but not in the stone; It is in the marrow but not in the bone; It is in the bolster, but not in the bed; It is not in the living, nor yet in the dead. This is a riddle, of course. Can you guess the solution? [From I Saw Esau, edited by Iona and Peter Opie.] Tuesday, October 23
A DEGAS FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 23 Oct 2007 10:38 AM PDT
 Degas' work is an odd combination of academic and Impressionist strategies. His draftsmanship tended to be rigorous, almost photorealistic -- he often worked from photographs -- and he shared the academic's preoccupation with the dramatic, expressive possibilities of space. At the same time his surfaces shimmered with a life of their own, in the Impressionist way, creating a powerful counter tension. The image above is very unusual. The design offers a bold recession of spaces, in three dramatic stages, while the treatment of the surface flattens it all out again, as in a Japanese print, also a strong influence on Degas' style. I can never feel comfortable calling Degas an Impressionist, but he wasn't an academic, either. He was just Degas. Monday, October 22
A SHAKESPEARE SONG FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 22 Oct 2007 10:53 AM PDT
 Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Nor the furious winter's rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Fear no more the frown o' the great; Thou art past the tyrant's stroke: Care no more to clothe and eat; To thee the reed is as the oak: The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust. Fear no more the lightning-flash, Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone; Fear not slander, censure rash; Thou hast finished joy and moan; All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee, and come to dust. No exorciser harm thee! Nor no witchcraft charm thee! Ghost unlaid forbear thee! Nothing ill come near thee! Quiet consummation have; And renownéd be thy grave! I've always loved this song, from Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare's late plays, especially this couplet: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. It's so Shakespeare -- speaking of the gravest things in the lightest and most lilting way. I can't help but see it as a reflection of the country humor Shakespeare grew up with, when hard things, all too familiar, needed to be tossed off carelessly at times -- sort of like the phrase "he bought the farm."  At any rate, the tone echoed through English literature -- A. E. Housman derived a whole oeuvre from it, as in the following: With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipped maiden And many a lightfoot lad. By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid, The rose-lipped girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade.  I also love the image in this couplet from Shakespeare's song: Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages . . . Though Shakespeare became a wealthy man and a speculator later in his life, he never got too far, imaginatively, from his working-class roots. Life to him was always a job of work, literally and metaphorically. He died soon after giving up his trade as a playwright -- in his heart, I suspect, the end of work and the end of life were more or less the same thing, as they were for most English country folk of the time. It took me a while to realize where the image in the couplet above comes from, specifically -- Saint Paul's letter to the Romans, where the apostle writes, "The wages of sin is death." Saint Paul didn't exactly mean that death was a punishment for sin, or that if you lived a sinless life you could escape death, because no one can live a sinless life. He was just making a general observation, as Shakespeare was, about the condition of man, imperfect by nature, doomed to die. When you take your last wages in this world, all you can buy with them is the farm. Sunday, October 21
THE DIFFICULTY OF DEALING WITH GOD
by
Lloydville
on Sun 21 Oct 2007 09:08 AM PDT
 A guy is talking with God and he says, "God, what is a million years to you?" God says, "A million years is a second to me." The guy says, "God, what is a million dollars to you?" God says, "A million dollars is a penny to me." The guy says, "God, could I have a penny?" God says, "Sure -- just a second." Saturday, October 20
MORE ON FILM NOIR AND THE DEATH OF GOD
by
Lloydville
on Sat 20 Oct 2007 05:55 AM PDT
 Although, as I wrote earlier, I don't see film noir as expressly concerned with theological issues, there is a sense in which the idea of "the death of God", as a kind of metaphorical expression for existential bewilderment, gets close to the heart of the tradition. Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour, a low-budget thriller from 1945, was arguably the first true film noir. It offered a vision of the world as a moral maze from which there was no exit -- an image that accorded well with the unconscious dread which gripped America in the wake of WWII and in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse. In this light, it's interesting to look at Ulmer's The Black Cat, a strange Universal "horror film" from the early 30s. There, the source of the horror that ensnares its innocent protagonists is a modernistic version of the old dark house -- which sits on the site of a ghastly battle from WWI, somehow infected by the mass slaughter that took place there.  This may not be enough to prove that Ulmer saw a connection between the moral chaos of Detour and the horrors of WWII but it certainly suggests that there may have been an unconscious association of the two ideas in Ulmer's mind. Certain modern commentators want to see film noir as a phenomenon with essentially political implications -- something that's not hard to argue given the leftist leanings of many of the great masters of the noir tradition, a number of whom were eventually blacklisted. But seeing film noir as essentially political expression I think sells the phenomenon short. Film noir reflected an existential dread far deeper than politics could encompass. "The death of God" gets closer to expressing this than "the corruption of Capitalism". Curiously enough, the French critic Luc Mollet said that Ulmer's whole body of work expressed "the loneliness of man without God". A recent essay on Jules Dassin's Brute Force, included in Criterion's DVD edition of the film, quotes Mollet dismissively and ironically, suggesting that he was just offering a kind of smokescreen for the political underpinnings of the noir vision. But I think it makes more sense to see the nutty, irrational Stalinism of many noir filmmakers as a smokescreen for the more comprehensive psychic dislocations of post-WWII America, in which Communism and Stalinism were just faddish, ill-conceived replacements for a God who seemed to have abandoned the world in the desert outside Los Alamos, New Mexico, after clearly announcing, at places like Auschwitz, his plans to retire permanently from the world's affairs.  If film noir were simply a reflection of the politics of its leftward-leaning makers, it ought to be terribly dated today, after the demystification of Communism and Stalin, those ephemeral shibboleths for which the Hollywood radicals martyred themselves. But film noir still speaks to us as strongly as it ever did -- perhaps because "the loneliness of man without God" still troubles the spirit, while the passing of Stalin and Communism go conspicuously unlamented. [Thanks again to Tony D'Ambra of films noir whose posts on film noir and the death of God prompted the thoughts above -- and to Michael Mills' classic film blog for the Detour advertising art.] Friday, October 19
EMILE FRIANT: A VICTORIAN ARTIST YOU SHOULD KNOW
by
Lloydville
on Fri 19 Oct 2007 08:34 AM PDT
 Émile Friant painted portraits and scenes of the French countryside. He had, to me, a decidedly cinematic eye -- his genre paintings are not sentimentalized and they have a bold, dynamic quality based on spatial compositions of great though subtle power. They remind me of Bertolucci's images in 1900.  The painting above uses a technique Tissot was fond of -- creating a space in the foreground that instantly occupies one's attention but which also opens up into a deep space beyond. Spaces opening up into deeper spaces instantly summon up the idea of movement, of the potential for movement -- they almost produce a sensation of movement. This and their photorealistic quality are what to me give them a cinematic quality. Friant was a late Victorian -- he lived until 1932, well into the era of the Impressionist triumph. Like John Singer Sargent he borrowed a freer approach to brushwork from the Impressionists while remaining true to the basic aesthetic ideals of the Victorian academy. You can see more of his paintings here, at the Art Renewal Center. Thursday, October 18
FILM NOIR AND THE DEATH OF GOD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 18 Oct 2007 03:27 AM PDT
 In a comment here (and currently on his own web site films noir) Tony D'Ambra posts an intriguing quote from Mark Conrad about the connection between film noir and existentialism: "My proposal, then, is that noir can also be seen as a sensibility or worldview which results from the death of God, and thus that film noir is a type of American artistic response to, or recognition of, this seismic shift in our understanding of the world. This is why Porfirio is right in pointing out the similarities between the noir sensibility and the existentialist view of life and human existence. Though they are not exactly the same thing, they are both reactions, however explicit and conscious, to the same realization of the loss of value and meaning in our lives." [This is from Conrad's book The Philosophy of Film Noir: Nietzsche and the Meaning of Noir: Movies and the ‘Death of God’.] I agree with the gist of the quote, and with Tony's assertion that film noir and existentialism have a lot in common -- though I'm not sure that there was a direct influence on the former by the latter. I think Conrad is on the right track when he locates the essence of film noir in a particular moral orientation to the universe and not in a style or in subject matter. I'm also not sure that the death of God is quite the right way to explain film noir, though -- except as a metaphor for "the loss of value and meaning in our lives". Film noir, to me, is more about moral bewilderment as a social phenomenon, with social causes, than about loss of faith in God. It's about male insecurity and fear of women, about a creeping dread that the world isn't what it seems to be, doesn't work anymore -- if it ever did. These sorts of feelings have theological implications of course, but they don't lead automatically to atheism or to existentialism -- not in America, with its strong Protestant tradition, which has always preached what the theologian Paul Zahl calls a "low anthropology", holding that the world is intrinsically corrupt, redeemable only by supernatural Grace.  Hitchcock's The Wrong Man is an apt illustration of what I mean. The film is pure noir -- except in its denouement, when the protagonist is saved not by a good woman or luck or some kind of desperate action but by the direct intervention of Jesus. This is not a whole lot more improbable than the ways some other protagonists get saved in the film noir tradition. We needn't go this deep, however, to find the core, and the enduring appeal, of film noir. The feelings it deals with, though brought to the surface by the peculiarly horrific experiences of the generation that suffered through WWII and afterwards lived in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, are common to all men and women at some moments of their lives.  Such feelings may lead to atheism, to philosophies like existentialism -- or to religious epiphanies like the one Saul had on the road to Damascus. Because film noir is art, not theology or philosophy, it is not concerned with such outcomes. It is only concerned with the feelings, with certain particular conditions of the heart -- with bringing them to the surface and allowing us to engage them. Wednesday, October 17
THE DARK FIFTIES
by
Lloydville
on Wed 17 Oct 2007 02:08 AM PDT
 We sometimes think of the Fifties, the Eisenhower years, as a time of blandness, naive optimism and conformity. As a kid in the Fifties that's how it seemed to me -- I took everything at face value. I was a member of the Mickey Mouse Club -- I had the ears.  Looking back today at the popular culture of the Fifties, with wiser eyes, perhaps, the picture is much different. The sunny side of things looks like the thinnest of veneers. Film noir flourished in the Fifties. Pulp fiction got unspeakably bleak and harrowing. The subversive sexuality and energy of rock and roll bubbled up from the black underclass with astonishing ferocity. Some white performers tried their best to tone it down, but it stayed dirty. Ed Sullivan could present it as a kind of vaudeville novelty act, but kids knew better -- soon it would become the soundtrack for everybody's life.  The Beats had already started turning on and dropping out, in an unsettling but compelling rehearsal for the Sixties. At the time it seemed like a bizarre aberration.  The film cycle depicting middle-class teen-aged angst and rebellion was born.  An old guy to the Brando character in The Wild One: "What are you kids rebelling against?" Brando: "What have you got?"  Low-budget sci-fi movies retailed images of apocalypse by the score.  Even the kinder, gentler manifestations of popular culture reveal, on closer examination, dark undercurrents. Charles Schulz said this of his mildly satirical comic strip Peanuts: "All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away."  And consider the apparently frivolous comic visions of Frank Tashlin -- which are, if examined closely, savage deconstructions of popular American culture.  Indeed, the more you look at Fifties culture the more it comes to seem that those mouse ears weren't at the heart of it -- they were distractions from a deep national anxiety, a brooding sense of dread that permeated everything. Tuesday, October 16
THE WOMEN IN FILM NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Tue 16 Oct 2007 01:18 AM PDT
 In my last post I quoted James Ellroy's brilliant summation of the message of film noir -- "You're fucked." One of the ways "you're fucked" in film noir is that most of the women you're going to meet in the shadowy backstreets of noir's dark city are going to be smarter and stronger than you are. They may use their power to save you, they may use it to destroy you, but the situation is going to be beyond your control.  This view of women was obviously a projection of male anxiety and insecurity in the post-WWII era. There are some extraordinary female characters in the film noir tradition, but usually they're not quite real -- they are demons, or angels, summoned up out of troubled male psyches. A film doesn't need a femme fatale to be noir -- they're absent in many classic films in the tradition -- but it does need a sense of male helplessness. It's a comprehensive helplessness, in the face of society and the universe itself -- tough, powerful women are just one manifestation of a general existential dread.  When the situation is looked at from the woman's point of view, we leave the territory of noir -- move into another tradition, typically that of the psychological suspense thriller, of the Hitchcockian variety, which is often presented from the viewpoint of the female, with whom we identify. This tradition predated noir and is in fact connected to works of Victorian Gothic fiction, such as Jane Eyre. It deals with more traditional female anxieties arising out of the contradictions of an insecure patriarchy. To me it makes no sense to call this sort of movie film noir, even though it may tap into the same mood of existential dread that pervades the classic noir. As I've observed before, it took the neo-noir Chinatown to look back on the noir tradition and try to imagine the effect of its male insecurities on women -- but this was never really a conscious concern of classic film noir. Monday, October 15
THE MESSAGE OF FILM NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Mon 15 Oct 2007 12:19 AM PDT
 In my last post I wrote: I would argue that pulp fiction, hardboiled fiction, from the 20s and 30s is something different from the wartime and post-war films that are, to me at least, the heart of the film noir tradition. Film noir drew on that fiction, just as it drew on the 30s-era crime melodrama and conventional detective fiction, but it became something new. So what was new about it? James Ellroy summed it up best when he observed that the basic message of film noir is "You're fucked." It's an existential message, philosophical (or perhaps theological) in nature. Another way of putting it might be "The world is fucked, at its core, and there's nothing you can do about it." You might temporarily survive the predicament this puts you in, or it might destroy you, but the predicament isn't going to change. This represents a profound divergence from the traditional "hero's journey", in which an everyman faces tests and ordeals in the pursuit of wisdom, of meaning. It also represents a divergence from the "outlaw ballad" tradition of the 30s-era crime melodrama, in which we explore the underworld and revel in the transgressive behavior of society's rebels -- all the while confidently expecting the rebel's death and a reassertion of humane values. In true noir, those traditional values have evaporated.  You have to ask yourself why such a radical divergence from earlier traditions happened in the post-WWII era, and the answer to me is obvious. The basic message of war, and particularly of combat, is "You're fucked." The soul-shaking experience of hearing this message delivered in the most brutal terms doesn't go away after the war ends, even if it ends in victory. It is not subsumed in feelings of patriotism or in the satisfaction of having done one's duty. It endures forever. In the case of WWII it had a macabre objective correlative -- the atomic bomb, the image of the mushroom cloud, which summed up the enduring sense of existential dread that had infected American society, and in particular its returning war vets.  Film noir was an arena in which that existential dread could be engaged safely -- and there was something exhilarating about the exercise, the exhilaration of dealing with an urgent but buried anxiety. The existential dread I'm speaking of here didn't define post-war America but it was there, and it couldn't be talked about directly in a world that was desperately trying to get back to normal. But it could be faced in art -- most especially in film noir. Sunday, October 14
WHAT IS DOMESTIC NOIR?
by
Lloydville
on Sun 14 Oct 2007 02:50 AM PDT
 Tony D'Ambra of the ever useful films noir web site posted an interesting comment about my Film Noir Master List which I'm eager to respond to: Tony wrote: I doubt you will welcome this comment, but here goes. I'm delighted by all thoughtful comments! He continued: I don't see the point of your classification system: it has meaning for you only and no film can ever be categorised to such a degree. I realize that my list violates convention, but others have found it useful, if only as a provocation to further thinking about the subject. It's primarily intended to provoke a new conversation about film noir, which in my opinion has gotten to be such a vague term that it's losing its usefulness. And Tony wrote: For example, there is wide agreement that Wilder's Double Indemnity is an elemental film noir, yet you describe it as a "domestic noir"? Neff is an unmarried loner and Phyllis an amoral gold-digger whose marriage was a sham from day one, so how does domesticity gone bad come into it? There is "no moral confusion" or "existential dread": both protagonists are motivated by greed and each has no scruples when it comes to making sure that only one of them makes it to the end of the line. Marriage has nothing to do with the dramatic imperative of the plot. Remember Phyllis murdered Dietrichsen's first wife, so she could marry him for his money. Neff was ready to be seduced and she knew it: this is the essence of the noir paradigm of the femme fatale, which has little to do, if it ever to did, with the role of woman in WW2 and its aftermath. Remember, the great noir novels by Hammett and Cain, were written before WW2. Domestic noir, to me, from Double Indemnity to Sunset Boulevard, is characterized primarily by a rancid view of domestic life, and especially married life. It's not about good marriages gone bad -- instead it reflects a jaundiced view of the domestic realm, sees it as corrupt, no longer viable, infected by the moral chaos, the existential bewilderment, of the wartime and post-war world. Double Indemnity takes place primarily in middle-class homes and offices -- not in the typical urban jungle of the classic noir, the labyrinth of the dark city. In the domestic noir, the existential dread symbolized by noir's dark city has penetrated the "normal" world, transformed it. Both traditions are dealing with the same existential dread, but viewing it from different angles -- different enough to constitute two distinct traditions.  Phyllis Dietrichsen is indeed a femme fatale, one of the most fatale in all of movies, but the presence of a femme fatale doesn't automatically make a film noir, anymore than the lack of one excludes it from the category. The femme fatale in the person of the vamp was a staple of silent cinema, featured in films we would never think of calling noir, and many classic films noirs have heroines who save the protagonist. Finally, I would argue that pulp fiction, hardboiled fiction, from the 20s and 30s is something different from the wartime and post-war films that are, to me at least, the heart of the film noir tradition. Film noir drew on that fiction, just as it drew on the 30s-era crime melodrama and conventional detective fiction, but it became something new. My underlying argument in all this is that we lose sight of what made film noir new and distinct when we confuse it with its antecedents and with other films that were dealing with the same cultural anxieties in different ways and in different contexts. Saturday, October 13
THE CIVIL WAR
by
Lloydville
on Sat 13 Oct 2007 01:52 AM PDT
 As a prelude to watching Ken Burns' new film about WWII, The War, I decided to have another look at his film about the Civil War. This isn't really a documentary, or a work of history -- it's a poem, made up of very beautiful words, both newly written and derived from historical sources, of images and of music. It's in fact an example of a new art form -- a new extension of what a movie can be, but so organic and effective that you wonder why no one ever tried it before.  One of its glories is that it so boldly deviates from the conventional filmmaking wisdom of its day. It constitutes a contemptuous defiance of MTV-style cinema. MTV-style cinema is founded on the proposition that none of its constituent images has any inherent quality or interest -- none of them is worth your serious attention. But the resulting strategy is to simply bombard you with vaguely engaging images which pass so quickly that you don't have time to evaluate them -- thus producing the impression that perhaps you have actually seen something worth seeing. The art of it is the art of the three-card monte mechanic. You aren't exactly the audience for this sort of cinema -- you're the sucker, the mark.  Burns, by contrast, doesn't need to use cinematic techniques to distract you from the fact this his basic material is shabby and second-rate -- because it isn't. This allows him to step back, let the material breathe, speak for itself. His primary technique is extraordinarily simple and extraordinarily effective. It is simply to marry one image with one sentence. Sometimes he will vary this rule, cutting to a new image on a phrase ending, or showing different details of the same image within the same sentence. Occasionally, for purposes of emphasis or surprise, he will cut to a new image illustrating a single word or name in a sentence.  But the primary strategy is generally maintained -- one sentence, one image. Once you get used to this, subliminally, it allows you to absorb the contrapuntal lines of word and image in a kind of composure of attention. There is a third line, of course -- the music. But Burns does something unusual with that as well. He recorded the music first and then conformed the pace and tone of the spoken quotes and narration to the music, and adjusted the images accordingly.  The result is dense and many-layered -- each line of Burns' film has a life and momentum of its own and does not dominate the other lines . . . but it has the wholeness and integrity and logic of a fugue. It's a remarkably fine piece of work. Friday, October 12
ANTI-NOIR: PITFALL
by
Lloydville
on Fri 12 Oct 2007 01:37 AM PDT
 Through the good offices of Joe D'Augustine, of the excellent Film Forno web log, I was recently able to view André de Toth's remarkable film Pitfall, from 1948. Joe thought I might find it an interesting example of domestic noir -- and on many levels that's just what it is . . . a taut, harrowing thriller about a man whose good marriage is threatened in violent ways by a moment's indiscretion. The film's tough, snappy, cynical dialogue bears favorable comparison with the dialogue in Double Indemnity -- and the moral confusion of the protagonist, played by Dick Powell, is pure noir. (We also get to see Raymond Burr in one of his earliest noir villain roles.) But there's something unusual about this film -- something that distinguishes it from true noir and from the films I think of as domestic noir. It's the way that the institution of marriage, and the women in the film, are portrayed.  Lisbeth Scott, in what ought to be the femme fatale role, isn't fatale at all, in the end. She's the victim of male obsession and mendacity, who's destroyed when she tries to strike back. What's important, though, is that we see the predicament she's in from her point of view -- not from the point of view of the men who don't understand her or fear her, as we would in a classic noir. (The oddness of this is only reinforced by the copy on the lobby card above, which tries to sell the Scott character as a typical femme fatale -- assuming that that's what audiences of the time were looking for.) More remarkably, Powell's wife in the film, wonderfully played by Jane Wyatt, is a true partner -- neither delivering angel nor destructive goddess, the two poles of womanhood in the classic noir. Pitfall offers one of the best and most convincing portraits of a good marriage in all of cinema -- which takes it far from the rancid view of married life found in almost all domestic noirs.  This film, in fact, presents marriage as a viable refuge from the moral maze, the existential dread, of post-war American life -- and it does so without a trace of piety or sentiment. Like young Charley in Shadow Of A Doubt, Powell's character in Pitfall feels trapped by family life at the beginning of the film -- only to discover in the end that it's the only thing in his life that makes any sense at all. It's a way out that's almost always denied to the protagonist of a classic noir, lost in the labyrinth of noir's dark city -- and a view of marriage that's unknown in the moral chaos of a classic domestic noir. I guess this film belongs in a category all its own -- anti-noir. [In honor of Pitfall I've added a new category to my Film Noir Master List -- Sui Generis, for noirish films that aren't like any other films noirs. So far it has two entrants, the anti-noir Pitfall and the schizo-noir Trapped.] Thursday, October 11
A NORMAN ROCKWELL FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 11 Oct 2007 01:31 AM PDT
 During the WWII years Norman Rockwell created a character named Willie Gillis -- an ordinary guy from a small town who joined the army. Rockwell chronicled his experiences in the war in a series of Saturday Evening Post covers. After the war, he showed us Gillis returned to civilian life -- above you see him in college, on the G. I. Bill, having survived and put on a little weight. It's a poignant image, for all it doesn't say. Gillis is preparing himself for a "normal" life in post-war America, with his pipe and his golf clubs -- but the war souvenirs hanging over his head suggest that he will always be haunted by memories out of place in a "normal" world. One of the virtues of Ken Burns' newest documentary The War is that it addresses the sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that returning vets, and the whole civilized world on some level, suffered in the wake of WWII. For the vets it was peculiarly disorienting, with feelings of triumph, guilt and shame all mixed up together. It was not something that could be talked about in the world Willie Gillis was trying to become a part of. All of this I think reinforces my notion that it was in art, in film noir particularly, that such disorientation could be engaged in a safe way, a socially acceptable way. You can read more thoughts on the subject here. Wednesday, October 10
TRUE NOIR: THE BIG COMBO
by
Lloydville
on Wed 10 Oct 2007 12:51 AM PDT
 The subject matter of The Big Combo, a terrific B-picture from 1955, might have easily been treated within the confines of a late-era crime melodrama or a police procedural -- instead it lurches instantly into the territory of the classic film noir and never leaves it, at least not for long. It's something you might expect from its director Joseph H. Lewis, who also directed Gun Crazy, one of the darkest and bleakest of all noirs. The Big Combo is about a policeman's attempt to bring down a modern crime lord, Mr. Brown -- a man so rich and powerful that he never has to soil his own hands with the dirty work. The police don't have the financial resources to investigate his multifarious organization, the big combo of the film's title, and Brown has enough friends in high places to put pressure on any cop who does try to go after him.  Cornell Wilde plays the one cop who won't give up, won't buckle under the pressure, and his boss thinks he's lost his mind. Fighting Brown is fighting the corruption of the whole world -- a fool's errand. It's Wilde's essential loneliness that makes him a classic noir protagonist. He doesn't represent the decent forces in society opposed to "respectable" thugs like Brown -- those forces simply don't exist. This is what distinguishes The Big Combo from a traditional crime melodrama or police procedural. At the same time, Wilde's detective is hardly pure himself. It's suggested that he secretly admires Brown, is secretly in love with Brown's moll -- that his crusade is motivated more by jealousy and resentment than by morality or a love of justice. This is what distinguishes the protagonist of this film from the traditional "tarnished knight" hero of traditional hardboiled detective fiction. The code of honor of the Wilde character is suspect.  At one point the moll, explaining why she can't leave Brown, says, "I live in a maze . . . a strange, blind and backward maze, and all the little twisting paths lead back to Mr. Brown." That's the predicament of Wilde's character as well. By the end of the film, the view of the world we've been given makes it quite irrelevant whether or not Brown is ever brought to justice. There's no sense that the world will be a better place if he is, because it will still operate by the same rules -- Brown's rules. The Wilde character's fight to extricate himself from the maze is heroic. He will save a few lives and avenge a few others along the way, but his existential dilemma will never be resolved, because the big combo is the world and it won't change. It will stay noir.  The ending of The Big Combo echoes the ending of Casablanca visually. But what different moral universes the two films inhabit. In 1942, Casablanca could make idealistic sacrifice look glamorous and sexy. By 1955, ten years after the end of WWII, the cost of such sacrifice had been measured. We had defeated the Axis evil, but to do so we had had to summon up reserves of evil within ourselves, and the ghost of it hovered, in the shape of a mushroom cloud, over everything. The Big Combo has been added to my film noir canon. Sadly, there isn't a satisfactory DVD edition of the film, although the Geneon release is watchable and cheap. The Big Combo deserves better, if only for the wonderfully inventive cinematography of the great noir master John Alton. Tuesday, October 9
DIGGING UP DISNEY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 09 Oct 2007 12:54 AM PDT
 Above is a detail from a cartoon published in The Realist in 1967. [Mature viewers not offended by moderately graphic sexual and scatological satire can click here to see the whole thing.] I'll never forget how happy it made to see this cartoon for the first time. I was seventeen then -- I saw it in the dorm room of a fellow student at my prep school who had a staggering collection of underground publications, including a complete run of Paul Krassner's The Realist. I can't believe the school authorities knew how much subversive literature he had stowed away in his room -- or how widely it was corrupting the imaginations of his fellow students. The Realist was truly shocking stuff in 1967. The image made me happy not because I hated the classic Disney cartoons and characters -- but because I loved them. I loved them too much, and unconsciously. They were embedded in my psyche on deeper levels than I ever suspected. To see them dragged unwillingly into the light of an adult consciousness, mocked and defiled, sexualized, allowed me to engage them as an adult -- to try and assess how they had affected me. And it allowed me to appreciate them as great works of art -- not just as cultural baggage. That appreciation has only grown over time. Transgressive, subversive culture works in counter-intuitive ways. By breaking spells, it can lead to deeper realms of magic and enchantment . . . which themselves will one day have to be transgressed and subverted. Issues of The Realist are being archived on the web now -- you can peruse them here. Sunday, October 7
CHANCELLORSVILLE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 07 Oct 2007 11:21 PM PDT
 If you visit the Civil War battlefield of Chancellorsville, in the Virginia countryside west of Fredericksburg, you can find at the intersection of two small country roads a marker at the place Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson met around midnight between the 1st and 2nd of May of 1863 to plan the next day's action. They had between them 40,000 men and they were facing a Union army of 70,000 men. Jackson had a startling proposition for Lee. His scouts had found some dirt roads through the woods that twisted around the right flank of the Union position. Jackson proposed that he lead his 28,000 men over these roads and fall upon the Union flank from behind. Lee pointed out that while Jackson was marching, he himself would have only 12,000 men with which to hold the 70,000 Union troops in place. Jackson nodded -- yes, that was about the size of it.  I like to think of the look in Lee's eyes as he contemplated this more or less insane idea -- they must have burned with joy at the boldness and fearlessness of Jackson plan. Lee thought about it for a moment and told Jackson to go ahead. Jackson made the march pretty much undetected -- reports of it that reached the Union officers on the right of their line were disbelieved. They were just too preposterous.  Jackson rounded the Union flank and attacked at dusk. The whole Union right collapsed and the whole Army of the Potomac was set in a panic that was just barely contained. It was one of the most stunning victories for an outnumbered army in all of military history -- but it's costs were high. Riding to the front to assess the progress of the action, Jackson was accidentally shot in the darkening woods by his own men, and would later die of his wounds (in the bed pictured below,) never resuming his command. The victory also emboldened Lee to make his second invasion of the north, resulting in the catastrophe at Gettysburg.  Ironically, it is the death of Jackson, and the defeat of the South, which allows one to admire the feat of arms that Lee and Jackson pulled off at Chancellorsville. Their cause had a great wrong mixed up in it -- the institution of slavery -- and no one can look back and wish they had won. But Jackson's death was a measure of expiation -- enough to let us love him and Lee for their genius and audacity and courage. It fixes the moment of their greatest triumph in amber, in a beauty outside of time. Saturday, October 6
FILM NOIR: A MASTER LIST
by
Lloydville
on Sat 06 Oct 2007 11:39 PM PDT
 Below is a provisional master list of what to me are the canonic films noirs, followed by lists of films that are often identified as films noirs but which I think fall into different categories. You can click on most of the category names for more thoughts on them, and on the underlined film titles for reviews. THE FILM NOIR CANON Out Of the Past The Killers His Kind Of Woman The Dark Corner The Set-Up Gun Crazy Fallen Angel Angel Face Touch Of Evil Detour The Wrong Man Criss Cross The Killing In A Lonely Place On Dangerous Ground Crossfire Where the Sidewalk Ends Brute Force The Sweet Smell Of Success Night and the City Thieves Highway The Lady From Shanghai 14 Hours The Long Night Nightmare Alley Odds Against Tomorrow Act Of Violence Crime Wave They Live By Night Decoy The Big Steal Side Street Where Danger Lives Tension Kansas City Confidential The Big Combo Gilda  HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE THRILLERS Murder, My Sweet The Lady In the Lake I Wake Up Screaming Laura The Big Sleep Behind Closed Doors The Mask Of the Dragon Vicki  DOMESTIC NOIR Shadow Of A Doubt Double Indemnity Clash By Night Leave Her To Heaven Sunset Boulevard The Night Of the Hunter Scarlet Street Blonde Ice Daisy Kenyon  POLICE/AGENCY PROCEDURALS (DOCU-NOIR) House On 92nd Street The Racket Call Northside 777 Panic In the Streets Border Incident The Narrow Margin Mystery Street Naked City Arson, Inc. Loan Shark Fingerprints Don't Lie F. B. I. Girl Portland Expose A Bullet For Joey  PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE THRILLERS Whirlpool The Big Clock House On Telegraph Hill The Blue Gardenia Shock Sudden Fear Shadow Man The Stranger  LATE-CYCLE CRIME MELODRAMAS They Drive By Night High Sierra The Asphalt Jungle Key Largo Railroaded Shoot To Kill The Big Heat Tough Assignment  FILMS OF INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE Contraband Casablanca To Have and Have Not Notorious Macao I'll Get You The Man From Cairo They Were So Young | |||
