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ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR

Lloydville — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:35:01 -0700

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 It's a 16mm preservation copy of a battered 35mm original, but it's all there -- the film as Lang originally made it, before it got cut down by its American distributor -- the only known copy of the complete film in existence.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.

A SONG FOR TODAY: MEXICO

Lloydville — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:02:05 -0700

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.

Listen to the song here.

JUDY AND NOEL

Lloydville — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:39:05 -0700

If you'd like to eavesdrop on a couple of legendary show business pros talking shop, scoot over to If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, which has posted a fascinating recording of Judy Garland and Noel Coward giving a joint interview to Redbook magazine in 1961. I've contributed a few guesses as to the occasion that brought them together and the identity of a fourth voice on the tape (in addition to the magazine interviewer's) -- but what's fun is to just listen to these two entertainers talk. Coward had been on the stage professionally since the age of ten, Garland since the age of two -- between them they'd pretty much seen it all and done it all.

They both retain a childlike quality, but that's part of what an entertainer's job is all about -- being childlike with the technique of a brain surgeon.

While you're at the site, check out the latest installment of the Truffaut-Hitchcock tapes, the recordings from which Truffaut assembled his great book of interviews with the master. More show-biz shop talk and always worth a listen.

ESSAY IN HONOR OF ANDRÉ BAZIN: COHERENT SPACES, SEDUCTIVE SPACES

Lloydville — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:56:02 -0700

Follow this link for the sixth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin . . .

THIS WEEK'S ORSON WELLES ON THE AIR: A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Lloydville — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:02:08 -0700

Gather the household around, dim the lights, click here -- then sit back and enjoy the radio theater of Orson Welles.

This week . . . "A Tale Of Two Cities", the third offering of Welles's Mercury Theater On the Air, from 1938.

This show will only be on the site for a week, so download it if you can't listen to it right away -- and tune in next week for The 39 Steps, the fourth offering from the Mercury Theater On the Air.

[You can get more information on Welles's radio work and listen to or download many of his broadcasts here -- The Mercury Theater On the Air. Many more broadcasts can be downloaded at this resource page on Wellesnet. If you get hooked, you can buy a remarkable collection of almost all of Welles' radio work, as both actor and director, in MP3 format on 7 CDs at OTRCat -- which also offers the discs separately.]

AWESOME

Lloydville — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:29:46 -0700

My friends Tracy and John had a baby today. His name is Maxwell.

Welcome to the world, kid.

PAS DE DEUX

Lloydville — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:52:03 -0700

In any kind of musical theater that involves dance, from ballet to a book musical, a pas de deux can dramatize a lot of different things -- flirtation, romantic exhilaration, the dawning or the fading of love. Because it involves a complex physical conversation between two people it almost always evokes the sexual act itself, and sometimes it does so in a very conscious way. It can do this without ever making explicit physical references to the sexual act, and is usually most effective when it doesn't -- when it evokes the moods and the moral evolutions of sex, mistrust, anxiety, curiosity, trust, surrender, transcendence. It can chart the interior narrative of sex, rather than its mechanics, mechanics which one proper British lady once described as "always the same ridiculous motions". The pas de deux can be a kind of metaphysical pornography.

(Image © Paul Kolnik)

It is certainly that in the ballets of the great choreographer George Balanchine, whose whole body of work can be seen as a meditation on the etiquette of sex. He saw a relationship between the formal behavior of ceremonial occasions and the courtly rituals of the boudoir -- for him, the two arenas of life informed each other, celebrated each other. His pas de deux could be funky, raunchy, wild and on the edge of control, but there was always an element of graciousness in them, of the mutual sympathy that fuels genuine physical passion. They were always about sex as an expression of love, whether sacred or profane.

The pas de deux in the musicals Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made at RKO in the 1930s are almost always about the sexual act, and very consciously so. "Of course, Ginger was able to accomplish sex through dance," Astaire once said. "We told more through our movements instead of the big clinch. We did it all in dance." Hermes Pan, who collaborated with Astaire in the creation of his dances, said, "We showed things you couldn't talk about."

After their first great pas de deux, in The Gay Divorcee, danced in a seaside pavilion to the music of Cole Porter's "Night and Day", Rogers falls back on a settee in a dreamy post-orgasmic languor. Astaire stands over her with a kind of cocksure but slightly goofy satisfaction and offers her a cigarette -- a classic post-coital ritual. (The production still above doesn't really do justice to the moment.)

In Roberta, probably the worst of their RKO vehicles, the characters they play (second leads) don't have much of a romantic narrative. They seem attracted to each other from the start, and the only suspense in the relationship comes from wondering when they're going to admit it to each other. It happens, of course, after they do a highly sexualized dance at the end of the film. They exit the arena they danced in and backstage Rogers again collapses in dreamy exhaustion. "I think I'm going to have to give in to you," she says. Astaire asks her what she's talking about. "I thought you were going to ask me to marry you," she answers. "I was," he says. "All right then," she says, "I will." "Thank you," he says -- and they shake on it.

It funny and charming, and the gag works because he's already told her he loves her, already asked her to marry him, and she's already said yes -- in the dance.

In Astaire's early years when he danced in vaudeville with his sister, their act always had a narrative element -- it told a little story in twelve minutes or so. In the romantic pas de deux he created for himself and Rogers on screen he never lost sight of the fact that the best sex always has the dynamics, the lineaments, of a good story. It was an insight he and Balanchine shared.

Balanchine considered Astaire to be the greatest dancer of the 20th Century -- and Balanchine had seen all of them, worked with most of them. It undoubtedly wasn't just Astaire's technique that impressed Balanchine, it was his expressiveness, and the fact that for both men sexual love was at the center of their artistic imaginations.

LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE

Lloydville — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:00:36 -0700

Things just keep getting better and better for fans of classic American comic strips. Little Orphan Annie has just been added to the list of strips that are being reprinted in volumes that will eventually cover the entire runs of these comics.

The first volume is available now. It includes the first few years of the strip, beautifully reproduced, mostly from Harold Gray's original drawings or from the syndication proofs. In them, the plucky Annie knocks about America spreading kindness or kicking ass, as the situation requires.

Here's a philosophical question for you. Why was it that American popular culture, back in the darkest days of patriarchy, kept coming up with images of powerful little girls, like Annie and Dorothy of Kansas, who set off on their own on dangerous journeys and triumphed over all adversities by force of character . . . while in our own nominally feminist age the most prominent role models for young girls are sexually objectified teen tartlets?

There are now four volumes out of the early Dick Tracy strips, seven or eight of Krazy Kat, three of Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates, two books which contain complete runs of Winsor McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze and Dreams Of the Rarebit Fiend -- plus two huge volumes which reprint color Sunday pages from Gasoline Alley and Little Nemo In Slumberland. If you pile them all up beside your bed or easy chair and read a few strips or pages a day, you've got your own personal funny pages to hand, some compensation for the fact that modern newspapers have no space for popular art this brilliant and this entertaining.

A FELLA WITH AN UMBRELLA

Lloydville — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:08:04 -0700

I'm just a fella,
A fella with an umbrella,
Looking for a girl who's saved
Her love for a rainy day.

Easter Parade, a film from 1948 produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Charles Walters, featured a cascade of songs by Irving Berlin, including a few of his great ones, but Berlin told his daughter that his favorite song in the film was "A Fella With An Umbrella". This surprised her, because it seemed so simple and modest -- almost a throwaway. But it's not really simple and modest at all -- or no more simple and modest than a stolen kiss.

A bit of doggerel is transformed by a surprising twist into an image of sweet, lyrical gallantry, echoed precisely by the lilting melody. What it is . . . is perfect.

The song is sung in the film by Peter Lawford and Judy Garland on a New York back-lot street, in pouring studio rain, mostly under an umbrella. Lawford delivers his part of the duet with charming amateurishness -- the choreography of their stroll is also simple . . . and just as charming. As in most Freed musicals, the perfectly calculated musical arrangement adds yet another level of enchantment to the number.

Check out the film, which is full of such moments.

PREGNANCY PACT

Lloydville — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:25:14 -0700

There's been such an uproar, such expressions of shock, over the possibility that a group of girls at a high school in Gloucester, Massachusetts may have entered into a pact to get pregnant and help each other raise their babies. It strikes me as a perfectly reasonable proposition, given the world these young women are living in. They obviously have no expectation of finding young men willing to be committed husbands and fathers, so they are doing what female elephants do -- they are organizing for a matriarchal social order.

In the social order of elephants, young males are forced out of the herd as soon as they attain sexual maturity. The males wander about singly or in small groups, getting into all sorts of trouble, fighting with each other and destroying things, and are let back into the herd only long enough to mate with sexually mature females -- at which point they are forcibly ejected once again. The young are raised exclusively by females. It's a kind of pregnancy pact.

Male elephants have not made the case to female elephants that they could be useful for something other than impregnating them, and female elephants have responded in the only logical way possible -- they have taken responsibility for organizing their society along lines that ensure both stability and the perpetuation of the species.

Given the state of American manhood these days, why should American women -- at least those more interested in motherhood than in careers -- behave any differently? Check out the iconography of the ad for Juno at the head of this post -- it's very easy to read. Men are clueless dorks, it says -- women rule. Juno stands before an orange evocation of the American flag like George C. Scott at the beginning of Patton. The guy doesn't seem to know where he is or what he's doing there. He could vanish and it would make no difference to Juno whatsoever.

If there was a pregnancy pact in Gloucester it may just mark the beginning of a massive earthshaking female elephant stampede. Young American men may have to prepare themselves for a lifetime of wandering around aimlessly, rubbing the bark off of trees for no good reason at all.

ARTHUR FREED: THE PRODUCER AS AUTHOR

Lloydville — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:37:51 -0700

In the history of the classical Hollywood studio system there were only a handful of producers with an authorial voice which could be read in the overall body of their work. Among them I would place Walt Disney, Val Lewton and Arthur Freed.

Disney of course owned his own studio, which operated just outside the Hollywood mainstream. Disney didn't write, design, draw or direct the great animated films on which his reputation rests, but he exercised total control over all these functions and he communicated a vision to his in-house artists of the films he wanted them to make. He was technically a producer, but so involved in the minutiae of artistic decision-making at his studio, and in such absolute command of them, that he is rightly considered the primary author of his films.

Lewton and Freed operated independent units within more traditional studios. They both specialized in genre pictures -- B-horror films and musicals, respectively -- and as long as they turned out profitable examples of these genres, they were given an unusual degree of control over their films. Lewton was subject to more interference from higher-ranking executives at RKO -- Freed enjoyed a close personal friendship with MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer and Mayer had an unshakable faith in Freed's judgment, which allowed Freed extraordinary freedom of action within his designated sphere. It was only with Mayer's ouster from MGM that succeeding studio heads began to interfere drastically with Freed's films, but even then only on his non-musical efforts.

Other prominent producers of the studio era achieved great power and prestige, but none of them communicated a clear authorial voice in their work. The films Hitchcock made for legendary producer David O. Selznick are best read as Hitchcock films, and even Gone With the Wind, Selznick's greatest triumph, owes its voice more to the artists who actually made it than to Selznick's vision as its producer. (Duel In the Sun, which may be the best expression of Selznick's "vision" as an artist, is a sprawling, unwieldy mess -- the vision at the core of it is in fact a vacuum.)

John Houseman, another legendary producer with a reputation for independence and good taste, was capable of producing both Citizen Kane and The Bad and the Beautiful, a film that consciously evokes Kane -- but the two films couldn't be more different in sensibility, in political and moral orientation. They better reflect the visions of their directors, Orson Welles and Vincente Minnelli, than the authorial voice of Houseman. (James Naremore, in The Films Of Vincente Minnelli, has written a brilliant analysis of the fundamental ways in which these two films differ.)

Of course no one person is ever the sole author of anything as complex and collaborative as a Hollywood studio film, on which many hands leave their mark. One can discover themes in Selznick's work, consistent from film to film, and a level of taste in Houseman's films which characterize all of them. But most great films are organized around a single vision, a single sensibility, despite some remarkable exceptions to the rule -- like Casablanca, for example.

That single vision may in fact be the result of a harmonious meeting of two or more minds -- between Toland and Welles, say, or, Freed and Minnelli -- but it remains singular all the same. Toland never worked on another film like Kane and Minnelli made different kinds of films when he worked apart from Freed.

Most great producers in the studio system functioned as editors function in the literary world. Editors in both realms can exert enormous influence, for good or bad, on the work they edit -- proposing subjects, making crucial artistic suggestions, cutting superfluous material or asking for additional work. But we don't confuse even the most brilliant and creative literary editors, like Maxwell Perkins (above), with the authors of the books they edited -- and by the same token we shouldn't confuse even the most powerful and celebrated Hollywood producers, like Thalberg, Selznick, Zanuck and Houseman, with the authors of the films they supervised.

But I would argue that Freed, like Disney and Lewton, was more than an editor, more than a supervisor.

Disney's freedom of action flowed from his ownership of his studio -- Lewton's and Freed's flowed flowed from other conditions, which were quite unusual. As I've said, both worked in conventional genres. They were specialists who were presumed to know as much about their specialties as anyone above or below them in the chain of command. As long as their films reached and pleased their intended markets, their bosses had no incentive to second-guess them, even when they indulged in radical innovations, as both did.

RKO market-tested titles and handed the most popular of them over to Lewton, who was expected to come up with films that matched them. In fact, he came up with very strange takes on these titles, films that were unlike any other horror films ever made, but they performed well at the box office and that was all RKO cared about.

Freed, as I've noted, had the friendship and the strong personal backing of his top boss in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer -- but even that went only so far in terms of corporate support. It was the four films Freed produced at the start of his career starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney that ensured his independence. These films were made at relatively low cost (for musicals) and earned a fortune. From then on he rarely faltered in terms of profitability for the studio. He had only a few flops and a few films that broke even -- the rest made good money. Mayer was inclined to let Freed do what he wanted -- the bottom line on Freed's films allowed him to justify this to his corporate overlords in New York.

It's instructive to note, however, that when the public lost interest in Lewton's type of horror film, almost no one in Hollywood had much interest in working with him -- and he himself didn't quite seem to know what to do with himself. And when Mayer was ousted as MGM's studio head, Freed's position grew more and more precarious. He was still given his head on musical productions, but his non-musical films were interfered with and sometimes mutilated beyond recognition. He had no inherent prestige or power as a filmmaker. When it was felt that audiences were losing interest in musicals, or more precisely that their costs made them too risky a gamble, Freed stopped being able to get projects off the ground altogether. He left MGM heartbroken over his failure to make a bio-pic about Irving Berlin, which he felt would be the culmination of his whole life's work.

Disney, Lewton and Freed were also artists in their own right. Disney may not have been a great animator but he could do it. Lewton was a writer who contributed not only ideas and stories to his films but also co-wrote some of them, under a pseudonym. Freed was a very successful lyricist who had contributed songs to many different kinds of musical theater. The direct contributions all three made to their films were not as significant as the fact that each knew how to talk to the artists who made them as peers. They conducted their editorial and supervisory business in the language of artists, not the language of corporate production.

The point to be made by all this is that producers in the Hollywood system needed very special personal qualities and very special circumstances in which to create an authorial voice, and so it's no wonder that there weren't more of them who did.

Walt Disney has received an enormous amount of critical attention, and there are numerous studies of Lewton's films, but Freed's films, as a body of work, have been covered in only one book -- The World Of Entertainment by Hugh Fordin, from 1973. Fordin's study is largely anecdotal, and while it draws on a great deal of documentary evidence, much of it apparently supplied by Freed himself, and on extensive interviews with some of Freed's collaborators, it is hardly a scholarly work. Nor does it offer much critical insight into the films as artistic achievements.

The neglect of Freed can be partly attributed to the fact that many of his greatest films were directed by Minnelli. There are lots of critical studies of Minnelli, and these seem to "cover" Freed's contributions to the Hollywood musical by treating him as little more than an enabler of the auteur director. But, as I say, the films Minnelli made for other producers are very different from the films he made for Freed, and the films made by other directors in Freed's unit at MGM have many crucial things in common with the Freed-Minnelli collaborations.

Freed's body of work has a coherence, a distinctive and unifying sensibility, which deserves examination on its own. His artistic vision developed in a systematic way -- its progress is comprehensible and illuminating, as are its roots.

I think a case can be made that Freed was just as much an "author" as Disney or Lewton and that his films, taken as a whole, are just as important as theirs -- which makes them very important indeed.

FLESH AND THE DEVIL

Lloydville — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:19:10 -0700

This legendary film has a set-up that promises a rattling good yarn -- two lifelong friends pitted against each other in mortal combat by a callow but irresistible woman. It is directed in bravura style, with flashes of cinematic brilliance, by a master of film narrative, Clarence Brown, and it features two of the silent screen's most appealing actors, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. The result is watchable, even entertaining -- but deeply unsatisfying on almost every level.

We see in this film what the 20th-Century, and the studio system in Hollywood, did to the melodrama -- perverting it meretriciously, heartlessly, systematically, fatally.

The melodrama of the Victorian stage, of Griffith and Pickford and even Murnau, was a stylized form in which a glamorized virtue was beset by crude though recognizable obstacles which seemed invincible but which virtue could vanquish, though often only by self-sacrifice and in death.

We may laugh at the form today, or find it charmingly quaint, but it represented a sophisticated dramatic tradition capable of conveying deep emotion and serious moral reflection. It is hardly more laughable or quaint than modern forms, in which a superior display of aptitude with firearms can right any wrong, in which glamor or cuteness alone can resolve any romantic complication, in which material or professional success signals the triumph of the good.

Melodrama only becomes grotesque and artificial when those who make it lose faith, consciously or unconsciously, in virtue, especially in self-sacrificial virtue. In our self-obsessed age, at least before 11 September 2001, virtue became suspect -- a sucker's game -- and sacrifice unthinkable. Not being able to have it all seemed a crime against a basic entitlement of humanity -- or at least that part of it lucky enough to be born into Western middle-class comfort.

This is why modern intellectual sophisticates laughed at the melodrama of Titanic, though its moral complexity far exceeded the dime-store nihilism, or self-referential fantasy, delivered by the hip filmmakers of the 90's. It was taken seriously, however, by ordinary people -- and especially by teenage women, who knew on some level that the nihilism and fantasy of their parents' generation had come to a dead end, had not prepared them for the world they saw before them, the world of Columbine and Osama bin Laden.

Flesh and the Devil represents a first step in the destruction of melodrama as a viable form -- as Titanic may represent a first step in its rehabilitation. In Flesh and the Devil, virtue is dessicated -- evil lush and ripe. Though the story tells us again and again that Barbara Kent is the good girl and Greta Garbo the bad girl, every single act of craft and genius on display in the film struggles to persuade us otherwise.

We are far from Griffith and Pickford here, whose great heroines showed us how appealing, energetic, sexy and even seductive virtue could be. Greta Garbo becomes, in essence, the auteur of Flesh and the Devil, because all its narrative ploys, all its moral stances, collapse into worship of her mysterious presence, her oddly luminous flesh.

In strictly narrative terms, there has rarely been a more extreme example of misogyny on film. Garbo's character is unremittingly evil -- her heartlessness, until the last unconvincing moments of the role, is absolute, her greed and selfishness both repellent and unmitigated. But Brown's camera and Brown's casting and Brown's staging worship at her feet. All the other characters are perfunctorily drawn, wooden in presentation, with two exceptions. One is the kindly old priest who is roused to an almost sexual excitement by his hatred of the Garbo character -- a hatred which the narrative invites us to share. The other is Gilbert . . . who struggles manfully to discover a complexity, a moral gravity in his character. In his final scenes he almost succeeds, but the odds are against him, the game was rigged from the start. The film believes in nothing but Garbo -- virtue has no defense against her, can reassert itself only by killing her.

One thinks of what the film could have been if those who made it were aware of this -- had some sense of the moral questions it raises. If Garbo's character had been granted a soul, instead of stripped of it, if Barbara Kent's character had been given even a hint of Gish's or Pickford's complexity and will and sensuality, the delicious possibilities of the tale could have unfolded into real melodrama -- which is to say, real drama.

But this film is an early demonstration of the use of a star to avoid drama, to avoid moral questions, to parade unfelt clichés and undeveloped characters and irresponsible attitudes before an audience mesmerized by glamor alone. A melodrama in which virtue has evaporated is not melodrama anymore -- it's more like Grand Guignol, without the shameless energy, the giddy frissons, the amoral abandon of a real Theater of Blood.

I'm not sure we can blame Garbo's collaborators too harshly for this, though -- she is sui generis. There is really no word for what she does on screen. It's not acting, it's not even performing -- she is simply a creature who has her being on film . . . the camera devours her, every molecule of her. The process leaves nothing behind -- no memory of a character, or even of a human being caught on film. She paradoxically incarnates the gossamer moods of certain kinds of passion, certain kinds of physical enchantment -- and vanishes as mysteriously as they do. But it's useless to deny how spectacular the phenomenon is, how strange and pleasurable -- just as it's useless to deny the charm of falling in love.

Brown and his cameraman and his screenwriters and his actors may have to be forgiven for losing their heads in her presence, and even for hating her power to undo them so utterly.

AN AMANDA VISELL FOR TODAY

Lloydville — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 02:11:42 -0700

The image above, Griffin Lava Breath, is from a new show by Amanda Visell opening today at the M Modern Gallery in Palm Springs, California. The show is called Tic Toc Apocalypse and features images of horror done in a cheerful cartoon-modern style. What fun!

Click here for a preview of the show.

SUBLIME HOKUM: Part Three, ARTHUR FREED

Lloydville — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:21:06 -0700

In some ways, Arthur Freed was perfectly placed to carry the Hollywood musical into the future. A product of the vaudeville era, he became a very successful lyricist, supplying songs, mostly in collaboration with Nacio Herb Brown, to every kind of musical entertainment offered on American stages.

He had a deep sentimental attachment to the traditions of American show business, especially vaudeville, but he was also a visionary, who knew that the traditions he loved could only survive in new forms that appealed to a new generation.

The key to his vision was Judy Garland, a kid but also a second-generation vaudevillian. Five of the first seven musicals he produced were vehicles for Garland, and in three of these she starred with Mickey Rooney, another kid with roots in vaudeville. All of Freed's Garland-Rooney musicals -- there were four all told -- were backstage ("Hey, kids, let's put on a show!") stories, and they each paid conscious tribute to the vaudeville tradition, but somehow Garland and Rooney made it all seem new. Partly this was because of their own youthful personae and partly because they made their bows to the past with an affectionate irony.

But Freed was just getting going. I don't know how consciously Freed was inspired by the art of Fred Astaire, whose sublimely expressive dancing suggested a whole new range of expression for musicals, showing how a down-home American sensibility could be conveyed in a supremely elegant form. However direct the influence, Freed got the message somehow.

The Garland-Rooney musicals have a down-home flavor. Garland and Rooney may play aspiring show business performers, with a virtuosity far beyond their years, but they are also icons of the American boy and girl next door. The musical films they did together combine melodrama with the more traditional elements of romantic comedy, as had the non-musical Andy Hardy films they made before they worked with Freed. There was corn-pone sentiment, about teen love and the family, mixed up with the nostalgia for vaudeville and the newfangled Hollywood razzmatazz.

Astaire and Rogers, in most of their films, play ordinary Americans slumming amongst the very rich in café society. In the Garland-Rooney musicals, home is the defining environment. Freed was feeling his way towards a new kind of domestic musical, which would reach its apotheosis in Meet Me In St. Louis.

Parallel with this new development, Freed remained true to the variety format, in films such as Ziegfeld Follies (above), a revue directed by Minnelli, who was also the director of Meet Me In St. Louis. And he continued to make backstage musicals like The Band Wagon and Singing In the Rain (actually a backlot musical), though even these had a more naturalistic tone than the surreal spectacles of Busby Berkeley in the 1930s.

Yet for all their relative naturalism, these films were highly stylized on a cinematic level. Freed hired Berkeley to direct the Garland-Rooney musicals, in a somewhat more muted style than he was known for, and in Minnelli he found an even more elegant and subtle cinematic magician. Freed realized that old-fashioned show-biz exaggeration, a dash of sublime hokum, had to be applied to the visual style of a musical, even as it explored the simpler virtues of life.

Freed created something new under the sun out of bits and pieces of things recovered from the attic of his fondest show-biz memories. He realized that the more show business changes, the more it remains the same, and he negotiated the paradox with impeccable flair.

A SONG FOR TODAY (TONIGHT): WYOMING LULLABY

Lloydville — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:09:02 -0700

Click here to listen to a home demo recording of Wyoming Lullaby (© 2002 Fonvielle-White) performed by J. B. White, who wrote the music. It can be freely copied and shared with credit to the composers and this site.

If you're having a hard time getting to sleep at night, this song should do the trick for you.

Image above © James Bama.

CREATURE

Lloydville — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 01:21:03 -0700

Cyd Charisse died on Tuesday at the age of 86. She was a powerful, elegant dancer in many of the great Hollywood musicals, with a technique grounded in her early ballet training.

She had an odd screen persona -- distant but also intimidating. She didn't have great range as an actress, but she also seemed to hold herself in reserve in front of a camera by choice, except when she was dancing -- and even when she was dancing, there was something held back. When she was at her sexiest she still seemed to be saying, "This is naughty, isn't it? But it's not for you."

She had the quality of a mythological creature, a female spirit incarnated, with a mystery that was never up for grabs -- not for sale at any price.

One of her greatest moments was a dance she did in It's Always Fair Weather -- in a boxing gym with tough-looking fighters for a supporting chorus line. The only tribute she would accept from the all-male crowd was abject worship. She looked tougher than all of them put together.

SUBLIME HOKUM: Part Two - THE AMERICAN MUSICAL

Lloydville — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:30:46 -0700

As I wrote in my first post on this subject, American show business has a surreal, incoherent quality which reflects the surreal, incoherent quality of American culture as a whole. It wants to synthesize elements which resist synthesis.

In some ways, vaudeville was the quintessential form of American show business, simply because its format allowed for incoherence. Dance, both high and low, ballet and tap, sentimental and comic songs, excerpts from classical plays, recitations of poems, acrobatics, juggling, animal acts, broad slapstick sketches, sing-along slide shows, rope and magic tricks, even, at the end of the line, movies, could all share the stage on a bill.

When something resembling the book musical appeared on Broadway, the vaudeville influence was great. Not only did vaudeville serve as a proving ground for the talents that created the modern musical theater -- musicians, songwriters and performers -- but it lent musical theater some of its grab-bag attitude.

The American book musical, a musical with songs interwoven into an overarching plot, was a kind of hybrid between European operetta and the vaudeville spirit. European operetta was very popular in America at the turn of the last century, but showmen intuited that a more American style, with pop songs and jazzier dancing would sell, too.

The books of book musicals still owed a lot to European traditions -- their plots tended to resemble drawing-room farces from the Continent, given a wise-cracking American twist. And the book musical didn't wholly dominate the New York musical stage until the 1940s. Revues, a higher-class version of vaudeville, competed for ticket dollars.

But even revues followed a path towards coherence. Vincente Minnelli, later perhaps the preeminent director of Hollywood musicals, became famous on Broadway for directing "themed revues" -- variety shows whose acts were tied together by consistent visual motifs. (Minnelli is seen above at his wedding to Judy Garland, a second-generation vaudevillian.)

When talkies opened the way for musicals on the big screen, the patterns of the New York stage were transferred to film. Lubitsch and Mamoulian created screen musicals that frankly imitated European farce -- they were, in essence, ironic, streamlined and faster-paced operettas. Actual operettas made their way onto film as well, along with "backstage musicals" -- technically book musicals but with built-in opportunities to feature just about any kind of variety number.

Alongside all these forms, the revue also survived, with screen variety shows featuring disparate acts tied together by the flimsiest of threads -- a radio broadcast, the high-points of a showman's or a songwriter's career.

And then there was Fred Astaire. On some level, Astaire changed everything. In the 1930s he appeared in musical movie revues and in book musicals, mostly with Ginger Rogers. The Rogers films were basically more sophisticated versions of the farce musicals which came into their own in the Princess Theater shows written by Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, starting in 1915.

The songs in the Astaire-Rogers films were usually integrated to a degree into the dramatic plot, moving it along and expressing character, but they retained the nature of "numbers" -- routines that existed for their own sakes. By contrast, the dances the couple did together, and those Astaire did alone, weren't "numbers", mere Terpsichorean interludes, in any sense. The pas de deux were masterpieces of erotic suggestion, of complex romantic emotions. They transported the characterizations of the dancers, the subtleties and the depths of their romantic engagement, to another level. They were both lyrical and profound. They also suggested a mature synthesis of European elegance and casual American wit beyond anything the American musical theater had ever seen.

Americans had never encountered Astaire's aw-shucks grace and style anywhere except in sporting events -- in the balletic beauty of a well-turned double play, for example.

This opened a door onto a whole new way of thinking about American musicals, a whole new expressive range for the form -- and it was Arthur Freed who led the Hollywood musical through that door.

JOKERS WILD

Lloydville — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:12:00 -0700

I've had many strange experiences in Las Vegas, but none stranger that seeing David Irving speak in a small banquet room at the Jokers Wild Casino, a little locals' joint on Boulder Highway, at the edge of town.

Irving is a very controversial historian of the Third Reich whom I've written about before, here and here. The most prodigious researcher in the German archives pertaining to National Socialism, and in the archives of the Allies that house captured German documents on the subject, Irving has written a series of books which are essential compendia of facts about Hitler and his state. But he has a bias -- a desire to show that Hitler and the Nazis weren't as bad as everybody thinks, and that the Allied leaders were far worse than anybody thinks.

His motives in this are suspect, since he occasionally reveals anti-Semitic attitudes that offend the conscience, but his facts are always right, even if he marshals them to serve a twisted argument. His books are respected, with reservations, by respectable historians, but he has been vilified mercilessly by just about everybody else.

He was imprisoned for over a year, in solitary confinement, in Austria for giving a speech in which he noted that the gas chambers at the Auschwitz historical site are reconstructions, which is true, and arguing that gassing was not in fact used systematically to kill prisoners there, which is hotly contested by other historians and by eyewitnesses. His words were thought to violate Austrian laws against Holocaust denial.

Irving is not exactly a Holocaust denier -- more of a Holocaust minimizer. He admits that many bad things were done to Jews by the Nazis, just not as many bad things as historians have claimed. And he insists that Hitler was out of the loop as far as the Final Solution was concerned -- that Himmler instituted mass killings on his own hook, so that the "Messiah" of the German Reich would not be tainted by the policy.

This strains credulity, of course -- imagining that a faithful lieutenant would do something so momentous on his own, something which Hitler would be held accountable for even if he knew nothing about it. Still, Irving can point to the fact that no document recording Hitler's acquiescence in the mass extermination of Jews survives, and that Himmler regularly removed allusions to the policy from reports he passed on to the Führer.

It strikes me as more likely that Himmler simply had an understanding with Hitler that the policy of extermination would not be referenced in high-level documents of any kind, so that Hitler would never have to contend with opposition to it from his high-placed generals and ministers, and that Himmler would take the fall for it politically if it ever became generally known. It wouldn't be the first time a politician used plausible deniability to try and cover his ass.

It's equally possible that documents recording Hitler's involvement in the Final Solution were destroyed before or during the apocalypse of Germany's collapse.

When I showed up at the Jokers Wild Casino I almost bumped into Irving as he wheeled a cart with boxes of his books into the place. I greeted him but he hurried on gruffly, perhaps embarrassed by being seen in shorts and a sports-shirt hauling his own merchandise.

His talk was held after a buffet dinner, included in the price of the lecture, in a small private room off the casino's coffee shop. The food was school cafeteria quality and barely warm. There were about eleven other people in attendance. I kept to myself, fearing what sort of conversations my fellow attendees might initiate. I overheard one older guy railing against democracy -- "It allows people to let off steam, to think they have some say over their government. America isn't a government, anyway . . . it's a corporation."

Irving's talk was generally reasonable. He spoke at length about his imprisonment, and the tale was genuinely harrowing. Irving reported to the outside world that the library of his prison contained several books he had written. At this point, a high Austrian official ordered all books by Irving in all Austrian prisons to be removed and burned -- "To show the world that we have moved beyond the Nazi era." The minister seemed to see no irony in using a book burning to demonstrate this point.

Irving then talked about his forthcoming biography of Himmler, which he promised would put to rest once and for all the idea that Hitler knew about the Holocaust. He said he expected to endure further persecution upon its publication.

Irving said a few troubling things. He said he told the Austrian press when he was finally released from prison that "Mel Gibson was right." He didn't elaborate on this in Austria, but to us he explained, "You know, about who started all the world's wars." In other words, the Jews. He said that Churchill did not become anti-Nazi until after he was paid 48 thousand pounds by a Jewish organization in 1936 -- an amount, Irving said, worth about 3 million dollars in today's currency. The implication was that all of Churchill's fine rhetoric was bought and paid for by Jews.

An odd evening with an odd man in an odd place in an odd town. That's Vegas, baby.

SUBLIME HOKUM: Part One - AMERICAN SHOW BUSINESS

Lloydville — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:13:19 -0700

American show business has always had a strong element of surrealism. One can read American show business as the arena in which Americans have attempted to come to terms with the dislocations and paradoxes of the American experiment itself. American culture owed a debt to but also wanted to break free of European culture. It has always tried to reconcile Puritanism with a penchant for frontier license. Although initially Anglo-centric, it welcomed a wide variety of other cultures and tried to incorporate them into the American sensibility.

The crucial dialogue of American culture has been conducted between its European and its African roots. Official separation of our white and black populations, undermined by a practical proximity and integration, led to a complex and profound conversation, conducted in code, which in many ways has defined American culture. The minstrel tradition, spirituals, blues, jazz, swing and rock were the result of a musical intercourse that has always remained problematic on a conscious level, deeply engaging on a spiritual and emotional level -- not just because it raised the issue of unsettled social questions, but because it exemplified the very essence of our national character.

The essence of our national character is that it doesn't know itself, that it has no core -- that it consists of one long negotiation between heterogeneous elements that resist synthesis. That is, of course, what makes American culture so alive and dynamic and fertile -- its improvisatory nature, its fundamental instability, which is also a fundamental openness to anything. Liberty, in a political sense, would have no "legs", would close on Saturday night, if it weren't reflected in this liberty of the everyday imagination -- and this liberty of the imagination could probably not have survived if we were required to take it too seriously, to think it through . . . if it weren't dressed up in shameless, unadulterated hokum.

So Louis Armstrong, one of the two or three greatest artists of the 20th Century, who happened to be black, had to appear in public rolling his eyes comically, with a minstrel-show smile.

So Elvis Presley could celebrate black musical culture in the Neverland of rock and roll -- as long as he presented the public face of a nice, buttoned-up Southern white boy when he wasn't performing.

The madness of it all is breathtaking, but it's madness with a method. Hokum is what leads us by the back door into the heart of the American dream.

The Duke and the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn are a paradigm of all American show business. Claiming a bogus descent from European royalty, these two rogues peddle their preposterous spectacle (a little misremembered Shakespeare here, a little gross-out humor there) from town to town, from meeting hall to meeting hall. They don't quite deliver what they promise, and sometimes get run out of town for their unfulfilled claims -- but, hey, that's entertainment, too. Who could ever forget them? Clearly the Royal Nonesuch will become part of the legend of any town they play, just as it has become part of the mythology of American literature.

They incarnate the spirit of the minstrel show, the circus, vaudeville, the Hollywood musical and American Idol. They are the patron saints of sublime American hokum -- one part hooey, one part bunkum, seasoned with chutzpah and a dash of sheer genius -- and even when we're tarring and feathering them, we love them . . . because they are us and, on some level, the best of us.

SOMETIMES IT'S NICE . . .

Lloydville — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:24:52 -0700

. . . to think about CNN anchor Brianna Keilar. She's really cute. She reminds me of the young Angela Lansbury, who was also really cute:

Brianna is a golf fanatic.

When she was in college -- not that long ago -- she wrote an interesting paper about John Ford's Rio Grande. (The things you can stumble across on the Internet!)

JUDY GARLAND BECOMES IMMORTAL

Lloydville — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:28:20 -0700

On the three-disc DVD edition of The Wizard Of Oz is an audio supplement featuring takes and outtakes from the recording sessions for the film, including about eight minutes of excerpts from the prerecording session for "Over the Rainbow" which produced the version Judy Garland lip-synced to on screen. She never performed the song better. In some ways the song feels too grown-up for little Dorothy, and Garland delivers it with a maturity beyond her years, but also with an inflection of simplicity and innocence that makes it work on every level in the film. The commercial recording of the song she did for Decca, which became a huge best-seller, is far less emotional and delicate.

In later years, as a concert performer, Garland turned the song into a bittersweet anthem for lost dreams, but it works best from the near side of hope, where the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.

Genius filmmaker Louis B. Mayer insisted that the song be removed from the film, because it slowed things down, but Arthur Freed put his job on the line to keep it in, and he prevailed.

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN

Lloydville — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:09:28 -0700

My friend Cotty writes to recommend the film The Edge Of Heaven and to record his disappointment at the small size of the audience he saw it with. He concludes:

Strange times in the movie business. Five independent distributors have disappeared or been absorbed or are under severe threat, all within the last sixty days. Warner Independent, Picturehouse, New Line, Vantage, and ThinkFilm all going or gone. Who will make and distribute movies that rely on audiences caring to leave the house just for the sake of the experience of the emotional connection that only movies can bring?

Despite complaints from disappointed or estranged film-makers, the fault, I think, lies not in our stars, or their managers or their studio enablers, but in ourselves. If we don't go, why should they build it?

Perhaps the Obama candidacy can revive a sense of connection, can remind us of a common experience of America's great strength in diversity, her powerful e pluribus unum past and the blunt necessity of shared response to global problems. But it will come too late to help Strand Releasing [distributor of The Edge Of Heaven] in its attempt to bring you a lovely and cinematic time in the darkened common room that is a movie theater.

Good thoughts for these bad movie times, but I'm inclined to play the Devil's advocate and argue that the public is never wrong -- that if good people shun good films, then there's something wrong with the films, at least as works of popular art. Films can be good and still not be works of popular art, but why are there so few good popular films?

The example of Obama's candidacy does, I think, point to the answer. Four years ago the American public rejected, by a slim margin, John Kerry, who would (I think we can all now say in hindsight) have been a better President than George Bush . . . but he wasn't the sort of President most Americans wanted. His candidacy reeked of Democratic Party caution and calculation, his case to the public was cast in Senatorial, which is to say, conventional Washington, rhetoric. He was a new version of the same old thing, so why not stick with the familiar version of the same old thing already installed in the White House?

If John Kerry and George Bush really are the same old thing, fundamentally, why not choose the guy you'd rather have a beer with? If the latest art-house release and the latest action-hero extravaganza are just variations on outdated paradigms, why not go see the one with the loudest explosions, the one everybody at school is going to be talking about next week?

One can come up with rational arguments against these propositions -- like the war in Iraq, for example, or the mind-numbing boredom of too much CGI -- but culture, political and artistic, is not a purely rational thing. It's too easy to convince yourself that George Bush might have known what he was doing when he invaded Iraq, or that the next Spiderman film is going to kick ass.

When politics and/or popular art don't reach something higher in us than business as usual, than commodity merchandising, we tend to rebel and refuse to make sensible distinctions between good and bad products. We often act against our own best interests out of a kind of unconscious rage . . . because we don't want politics or popular art to be about "products" at all, or not only about products.

I think this explains why Republicans have been able to persuade lower-income Americans to vote Republican against their own economic interests by pushing "values" buttons -- by suggesting that gay marriage, for example, is an assault on "the traditional family". It's irrational, but to such Americans even an irrational vote in favor of "the traditional family" makes more sense than pretending that one corporate-sponsored political product is better than another.

On the left, the phenomenon would explain all the votes for Ralph Nader in 2000, which may well have cost Al Gore the Presidency. More importantly, it explains the millions in the last two elections who voted with their rear-ends by planting them firmly on their couches and staying away from the polls altogether. Again, it seems irrational, contrary to self-interest, but in fact reflects, at least on one level, a perfectly rational disgust with the whole system.

This year the Democratic Party machine, with its support for Hillary Clinton, tried to offer Americans an even newer version of the same old political product -- a female political product! -- and came very close to putting it over on us.

Obama beat her not because he had a more effective mask covering his political product-ness -- a black political product! -- but because his whole campaign, everything about him, felt genuinely different. He spoke in a new kind of language which we've hardly ever heard from Washington, he raised money from small-time donors which made him independent of the Democratic Party machine, he sent out an army of organizers who didn't look or act or talk like party hacks.

And yet . . . he spoke to old values, to popular concerns, to the shared e pluribus unum past Cotty mentions, one that is still with us, still capable of inspiring us.

The lesson in this for me, as it relates to movies, is that the mass of people don't really want anything that has the stink of current movie logic on it -- neither wonderful little art-house movies nor committee-made would-be blockbusters. They'll settle for them, if they can't get anything better, but in smaller and smaller numbers and with less and less enthusiasm.

They want something that feels different on a molecular level, the way Obama's campaign feels different on a molecular level. They want a change, a fundamental change -- even though that change, like Obama's rhetoric, may take us back to old, forgotten truths.

Movies, like Obama, don't have to choose between an isolated integrity and pandering to the tastes of the masses -- they can choose another path . . . honoring the tastes of the masses, as Obama has honored the aspirations of a broad public. The key is believing that the aspirations of the broad public are worth honoring, and trusting the broad public to respond. It requires a leap of faith, a violation of all conventional wisdom, a wild kind of hope. It requires, in short, something as improbable as Barack Obama's candidacy.

So my question to filmmakers is, as one Obama bumper sticker puts it -- Got hope?

THE CLOCK

Lloydville — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:35:00 -0700

THE FILM

The genius of Hollywood in its Golden Age was in glamorizing simple virtue -- the most famous case in point being Casablanca, which managed to make the sacrifice of true love for a higher cause seem unspeakably cool.

Another film made during and about WWII is in some ways even more impressive and certainly more moving. In Vincente Minnelli's The Clock Judy Garland plays a Manhattan secretary who meets a serviceman, played by Robert Walker, on 48-hour leave in the city before heading overseas.

What "heading overseas" suggested when the film was made (1944) has to be kept in mind while watching The Clock today, because it's crucial to every moment of the film, which takes the full measure of what it means to fall in love in the face of mortal peril. In some ways the gravity of the lovers' predicament in this tale is what allows Minnelli to pull off the miracle at the heart of it -- giving the story of two totally ordinary people the grandeur of the most sublime romance from legend or myth.

James Agee wrote a beautiful appreciation of the film when it came out, which can be found in his collected criticism, Agee On Film, and can't be improved upon, but check out this interesting view from a contemporary blog, The Sheila Variations. It's worth pointing out, too, that this was the first non-musical film directed by Minnelli and produced by Arthur Freed, who had the previous year collaborated on one of the greatest movies ever made in Hollywood, Meet Me In St. Louis, a musical also starring Judy Garland.

Garland and Minnelli were in love during the making of these films, and Minnelli's feeling for the actress informs every frame of them -- she is a radiant being in these movies, glamorized, certainly, but in a down-to-earth way that suggests the way ordinary people glamorize a new love. Minnelli seemed to find everything about her enchanting, which is why he could present her in such simple roles without feeling a need to "sell" her charms in any way, to make her larger than life. For him, clearly, she was already larger than life, even when she walked across a room or ate some soup.

Garland doesn't behave like a star in The Clock -- she doesn't need to. The state of being loved relieves her of the need to appeal to any outside authority for approval. The result is paradoxical. She grows as an actor, becomes more fascinating as a screen presence, even as she retires into herself, makes us comes to her.

Like James Cameron's Titanic, The Clock manages to convey the narrative of a life-long love in a very compressed period of time -- the awareness of death in both stories allows us, as it forces the characters, to read immense import into the simplest gestures, the most modest acts of sympathy and kindness, the plainest impulses of physical attraction.

In The Clock, as in the beginning of any real love affair, less is more. The way Garland adjusts Walker's tie at the train station before saying goodbye to him tells us more about the wedding night they've just shared than any dramatization of it could have suggested. Its very discreetness evokes the privacy of genuine intimacy, and yet we share it, not as voyeurs but as privileged participants in its magic.

As Garland leaves Walker's train the camera follows her and then rises up inexorably, in one long, tracking crane shot, until she's lost in the crowd at the station -- her story, which is our story, too, now, becomes one story among many, and no less extraordinary for that.

THE VISUAL STYLE

Although the tracking crane shot described above is one of the most beautiful and effective single images in all of cinema, The Clock is not a consistently interesting film visually. Set in New York but shot almost entirely on the back lot of MGM in Culver City, it relies very heavily on backscreen projections, which cumulatively produce a claustrophobic effect. This doesn't hurt the story too badly, since part of Minnelli's strategy in telling it is to focus our attention closely on the growing intimacy between Garland and Walker, which he charts with great delicacy. The body language of two strangers falling in love has rarely been evoked with such precision and sympathy. It's a "visual effect" which, more often than not, trumps cinematic style.

The sound-stage recreation of the train station is spectacular, consistent with its crucial role in the drama, as is the recreation of the subway stations where the lead characters lose each other, in a brilliantly shot and choreographed passage.

Citizen Kane, made just a few years earlier, contains this same mixture of spatially seductive choreography on sets and relatively alienating process photography. In Kane, the mixture is weighted towards the former, in The Clock towards the latter, though Minnelli demonstrates his mastery by reserving the "set" pieces for passages where he really needs them -- where a visceral appreciation of the space the characters inhabit is crucial to the emotional effect of the scenes.

But there are moments when the process photography undercuts the emotional effect -- as in the scene where Walker runs after Garland on the bus. It's a cute gag played against process screens -- it would have been heart-stopping played on a practical set or a real location.

THE CONTEXT

"Glamorizing virtue" was part of the commercial calculation of Hollywood, especially at MGM, where studio boss Louis B. Mayer insisted that MGM films promote "family values". These were values that Mayer touted but did not practice. In middle age he dumped his aging spouse for a more glamorous trophy wife. He treated his stars like farm animals -- pampered farm animals, admittedly, ones he expected to win him blue ribbons at the county fair.

Mayer copped feels from the teen-aged Garland at every opportunity, even though he wasn't especially attracted to her -- he was just exercising the greengrocer's prerogative to squeeze the produce. MGM plied Garland with amphetamines when her work load slowed her down, then "graciously" paid for her rehab when she crashed, hoping they could still get some more mileage out of her.

This sort of hypocrisy is visible in many of the sentimental films made at MGM -- like the wildly popular Andy Hardy series, made for peanuts and consistently profitable for almost a decade. Mayer loved these films, but seen today they reek of calculation and exploitation. All their sentiment seems not only contrived but downright cynical. The films do have their moments -- the homespun virtues they celebrate are intrinsically attractive -- and if you're in the right mood they can get to you. More often you're keenly aware of being manipulated by shrewd hacks.

Arthur Freed, who produced The Clock, and most of MGM's great musicals, was hardly a saint, and is reported to have had recourse to the casting couch at MGM on occasion, but he was devoted to his family throughout his life, and he imbued everything he worked on with genuine feeling -- contrived, certainly, engineered with old-fashioned theatrical calculation, but never cynical, even for a moment. His films could be corny, way too obvious and even clumsy in their appeal to the heart, but you never get a sense that the artists who made them are trying to put something over on you they don't believe in themselves.

Freed's sincerity is what elevated films like The Clock and Meet Me In St. Louis above the sort of saccharine platitudes found in the Andy Hardy series. One can say for Mayer that he recognized the real thing when he saw it and backed Freed to the hilt as a producer, even when the other great minds on the lot dismissed Freed's stories as simple-minded. Freed rewarded Mayer's faith with sublime works of art which also made money -- with films which now constitute the core of Mayer's legacy. Without Freed, that legacy would consist mostly of clever junk like Love Finds Andy Hardy, which plays today like a mediocre, padded-out sitcom.

MUSIC, DANCE, CINEMA -- Part Three, BABES IN ARMS

Lloydville — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:27:32 -0700

Babes In Arms was Arthur Freed's first solo effort as a producer. He'd worked as an unbilled assistant producer on The Wizard Of Oz, and even though that film hadn't been a smash hit on its initial release, Louis B. Mayer had great faith in Freed's judgment. Freed was one of Mayer's few genuine friends at MGM, with a standing invitation to breakfast at Mayer's home. When Freed told Mayer he wanted to make a film showcasing Judy Garland in a more conventional musical than The Wizard, Mayer gave him his head.

Babes had a relatively low budget but earned a fortune -- it was far more profitable for MGM in the short term than The Wizard had been. Babes was based on a Broadway musical with songs by Rogers and Hart, but Freed dropped several of the numbers from the stage production and added new ones by other composers. He also radically reworked the plot. The changes he made offer a clue to Freed's vision for the Hollywood musical at the very start of his producing career.

The Broadway show concerned a bunch of kids, the sons and daughters of old vaudevillians, who decide to put on a show to help out their parents, who are going through some hard times. The parents don't appear in the stage version, but they are prominent in the film -- featured in a long prologue in which we watch the decline of vaudeville in the early decades of the 20th Century and its virtual demise with the advent of talking pictures.

Freed, a very successful songwriter, had cut his teeth in the vaudeville era, working for a time as an accompanist in the Catskills, and obviously loved the vaudeville traditions very deeply. In Babes, the story of a new generation of performers who revive their parents' Golden Age, he clearly saw a metaphor for what he wanted to do at MGM -- keep those old traditions alive in a contemporary medium. Almost all of his films are imbued with a nostalgia for the theater of his youth, for a magic which he could not believe was really past and gone.

Babes contains loving recreations of routines from the old minstrel tradition, enacted by teenagers, which are saved from bad taste by the affection the filmmakers and performers obviously feel for the pure theatrical genius of the form. In Strike Up the Band, Freed's follow-up to Babes, also starring Garland and Mickey Rooney, there's a good-natured send-up of Victorian melodrama.

Love of theatrical tradition, and a determination to honor it, are key emotional components of these films. But there's also a canny sense that the tradition had to be revivified, translated into dazzling cinematic terms. Freed hired Busby Berkeley to direct the Garland-Rooney musicals. Berkeley was a Broadway choreographer before he came to movies, but he was also a cinematic visionary, who expanded the stage aesthetic into realms that only the camera could explore. Long takes recording complex choreography, swooping crane shots, stage sets that opened up to fantastic proportions were central elements of his style.

A short time later, Freed brought Vincente Minnelli to MGM and championed his career as a movie director. Minnelli had also started out on Broadway, as a director, and like Berkeley had a vision of presenting stage spectacle on film in intrinsically cinematic terms. Minnelli had a more elegant touch than Berkeley, and also got along better with Judy Garland -- so much so that the two eventually got married -- and he became Freed's preferred director for musicals.

Still, as early as Babes In Arms, Freed's emotional and aesthetic ambitions are clear. Like Orson Welles, Freed transformed a profound love of theater into radical cinematic experiments that would convey theatrical effects in the language of movies, that would make old theatrical forms live again on the screen. It was a paradoxical ambition, but it paid off -- it led both men to expand the boundaries of cinematic expression in unique and thrilling ways.

THE TIMES

Lloydville — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:02:34 -0700

It took some pushing and shoving and tough talk from her backers in Congress, but Hillary Clinton finally acknowledged that Barack Obama had won the Democratic nomination for President. Then she endorsed him, plausibly and honorably in a speech that spoke to the historic nature of both their candidacies. I think one can say that nothing in her campaign became her like the leaving it. (Image above © Zina Saunders, with thanks to Potrzebie.)

Obama also got a different kind of endorsement from a different kind of icon. In a recent interview Bob Dylan said:

Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralising. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up...Barack Obama. He's redefining what a politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to. You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future.

From the very tail end of this (with thanks to Cotty.)

As you probably know, Barack Obama will give his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on the anniversary of the March On Washington and Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech, in 1963. As you may also know, Bob Dylan was there. Check it out here:

Only A Pawn In Their Game

Awesome times, then and now.