"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic."---Gore Vidal on the modern United States
I note with sadness the passing of Gore Vidal the other day, at age 86. Not that I agreed with all his historic viewpoints, his stubborn belief that Franklin Roosevelt's embargo of oil and iron exports to Japan was an invitation for that Empire to destroy the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, and the reasons behind the rise of Christianity in the Ancient World to name two . But I found him to be that rare person who not only wrote interesting novels about American life and its checkered past, but also someone who was quite capable of speaking his mind in television and radio interviews in an entertaining and provocative way. His was a voice that allowed me to see the world in a different light.
I am also writing this little note to give the man his due---his views from the 1960's to the 90s were pretty much correct--the USA was an empire, both parties were controlled by giant corporations, especially the Republicans but too often the Democrats, that the war on drugs was un-winnable, that Ronald Reagan was a corporate shill and he would bring worse shills to follow his path, that religion could be used as an instrument of hatred and intolerance, that it didn't matter a hoot in hell who people choose to sleep with, etc.
And that Mr. Vidal could make all these statements in his interviews and highly cogent essays with a big dollop of wry and sharp humor. If he was a Jeremiah issuing warnings against the inflated hopes of American Exceptional-ism, he did it with panache and satiric skill. He was as much an entertainer in the best sense as he was a pundit and that former attribute had to be the ONLY reason he had such a high--profile platform in America's mainstream media.
There wasn't much Gore Vidal didn't do in that major media. He started out as one of many promising post-war novelists (after spending three years in the US Navy) and had the family connections to pursue a career in politics. According to Vidal in his first volume of memoirs, he had a god shot at an open seat for Congress in the state of New Mexico, where he had attended prep school. But his novel "The City and the Pillar" about two male gay lovers, published in 1948, put an end to those chances. Homosexuality was a no-go and even a hint of it could kill a political career, as Vidal himself showed in his most famous play, "The Best Man" (1963) about political in-fighting at an American party convention.
A television and Hollywood screenwriter in the 1950's, he left America often to write his novels in the more tranquil old-world vistas of central Italy. Starting with "Julian" (1964) , a novel of the last non-Christian emperor of Rome, most of his novels were popular, despite the fact that he broke taboos and smashed icons that others had tried and failed to make pay either form a lack of talent or censorship. It was no matter if he was writing about a transvestite hero in 1940's Hollywood, "Myra Breckinbridge" (1968) or revealing the warts-and-all biographies of our sacred Founding Fathers in his favorite novel of mine, "Burr" (1973) or writing a more sympathetic novel of the trials of the Civil War, "Lincoln" (1985), Vidal's books were entertaining and subtle subversive.
Each of his historic novels took him about a year of research and it paid off in my view. He also was a prolific contributor to "The New York Review of Books" "Time", "Smithsonian" , "The Nation", et al, and his book tours always gave his fans plenty of vigor and vitriol even before they bought the book. I still recall how, in an appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in the mid-80s', how he blithely predicted that the United States would overtly invade Mexico because "we've done it before for land and now we need their oil." Carson's look of faux-stoicism and quick cut to a commercial was a priceless moment.
The Mexican invasion didn't quite happen of course, although the prophecy came all too true in the Middle East first with Bush I and then Bush II in Iraq and Kuwait on behalf of Big Oil and Big Military Contractors like Vice President Cheney's own boys club at Haliburton.
His feuds with his contemporaries like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and his old friend Tennessee Williams were also famous. Indeed I don't think we will ever see his like again---the writer-figure as a personage in him or herself, known to anyone interested in his nation or in politcal ideas. Vidal was right again--the value of the profession writer was ebbing in American mainstream society , he noted lamentedly several times in interviews. I see nothing today to dispute that.
This 2009 book follows three major story-lines. It covers the growth of United States entertainment business, the raising of its armed forces and its cultural power through government propaganda and movies in the second decade of the 20th Century.
Gold's book is rather like E.L Doctorow's best-seller "Ragtime" from the 1970's in that he gives us real characters (like Charlie Chaplin, British general Edmund Ironside and US Treasury Secretary William McAdoo) interacting with other real-life and fictional characters.
The first story is centered around Charlie Chaplin, the first male film superstar, circa 1916. On a November day in that year, there is a sudden bout of mass hysteria: all over the USA there are hundreds of reported sightings of the former English Music Hall comedian turned universal "Tramp" character in small theaters from California to Maine.
This mass-sighting event really happened. Gold reportedly read 400 books and did years if research to get the stories in the novel right and it brims with time-appropriate details that make you feel right in the past, a past now dead to the living today with only glimpses of that time in pieces in films and photographs, and in the words of those who left a record in print.
Chaplin is a sudden and unparalleled success. Women all falling all over themselves after a little cockney kid who grew up half-starved most of his childhood and was once found begging on the streets of Lambeth for food by offering a paper hat he had made from a discarded newspaper. Now he's rich. He plans to build his own film studio and, with the help of his trusted business partner and brother Syd, can make any his film he wants and however he wants.
Only three things scare the 27-year old Chaplin: the English-language press calling him a "slacker" for not joining up to fight in the "Great War" either for Britain or soon, America; the prospect of his mentally ill mother, Hannah--whom he has said in earlier interviews was dead--coming over from England to make his life more complicated, and the withering personal and professional criticism of the other greatest star in Hollywood, Mary Pickford.
Mary is Chaplin's "bete noire" : the darling golden-locked sweetheart who has a canny mind and a sharp-honed tongue has also come up from poverty and she is a business woman to be reckoned with. Chaplin has little use for Pickford and the competition she represents but he does have longings for Mary's pretty scenario writer (Frances Marion, another real-life woman and one of the few women to wield power in the industry). There is also the sticky matter of a certain 15 year old high school girl and part-time actress named Mildred Harris, whom Charlie takes a liking to after meeting her at a memorable party scene in a Santa Monica mansion owned by early movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn. It is the first of several cases where Charlie's love life will shape the public perception of the man behind the "little fellow", a jack of all trades character to some, a clown to others like Pickford and a genius who cribs bits from great books to insert in casual party conversations so he can be taken seriously as a person and in his work.
The title "Sunnyside" refers to a 1918 movie Chaplin made, his first full-on attempt to make a movie with some "serious" messaging between the kicks, pratt-falls and stunts.
By 1917-18, the growth of the motion picture industry in the United States has exploded; a small-scale Los Anglees-based industry has become a world-wide center of capitalist industry, helped greatly by the literal collapse of the movie industry in Europe after 1914.
Powerful people in New York now want to take over the picture business and turn in-dependant film stars like Chaplin, Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks into contract players working in big studio factory set-ups. Oligarchic power and loss of control makes for one more thing Charlie has to worry about. He has no plan to stay free, but his nemesis "Little Mary" and his friend Doug Fairbanks may offer a solution. But Mary and Doug have their own personal problems--both want to divorce their mates and carry on with each other. Will their divorces or news of their affair become public and ruin their careers with a a still-puritanical portion of their adoring public?
Other powers in America eye the motion picture industry with covetous intent after 1917, specifically the Woodrow Wilson Administration and the Secretary of the Treasury, William McAdoo. McAdoo is impressed that people are willing to shell out money to see movie stars. He needs to raise money for "Liberty Loans" to shore up the expense of sending America into a major foreign war for the first time in its history.
(below a clip from the 1982 Thames documentary series , "Unknown Chaplin", narrated by James Mason.)
One of the book's best scenes is a Liberty Loan Drive in San Francisco. Chaplin, Pickford and the cowboy star William S. Hart are there having previously toured all over the country to raise money for fighting "The Hun". Millions are raised and Chaplin is off the hook for being a slacker. For the first time, the United States government is also making movies. Propaganda is being brought to new heights. War fever is hot in America but ordinary folks parting with money is another matter. Combine celebrity and parades and girl scouts collection pledges and peer pressure and suddenly McAdoo has a formula to save democracy or Big Banking or any other reason there might be to fight a war.
There are groups also ordinary propagandists called" The Four Minute Men" who go theaters that show films and sell the war in pithy poetry and bathos--between the changing of movie serials and newsreels. The speakers try and get people to shell out money to send their young men "Over the Top!" in a war that has already claimed millions of lives on two major fronts in three and one half long desperate years.
One of the young men who volunteer for the job is Leland Wheeler, the young, star-struck and illegitimate son of a Wild West show impresario and a lady lighthouse keeper. When his efforts backfire and he is sent to the Western Front as an aerial observer, we see a part of the last months of the war in graphic detail.
The final part of "Sunnyside" concerns a less well-known part of American entry into European warfare---the travails of the North Russia Allied Expeditionary Force, led by a British general, Edmund Ironside. The American who is the protagonist for this part of the story is a young Texas snob named Hugo Black. Thousands of US troops--mostly those considered "C" class forces not cut out to be much use in France against the Germans-- land in Archangel, Russia, three degrees above the Arctic Circle. Black meets a couple of destitute Russian princesses who have their eyes on him being their ticket out of the nightmare of Russia at war.
The coalition mission is to spread democracy and stop the Bolsheviks from taking full control of the region. The Americans call themselves the "Polar Bears" and most of the troops are from the frigid area around the Great Lakes region. But the Russian winters beat Detroit cold snaps all to hell. And the "Bolos" are fighting on their own turf, or tundra as it were.
Officially the so-called Slavic-British forces do some fighting and a good deal of freezing once winter sets in. The story has obvious parallels to today's bloody contests in Afghanistan and Iraq and the results are little better. This third story is based on solid truth, although as the author notes in an afterward, it is the sort of thing that should only have happened in fiction.
"Sunnyside" is a long book (550 pages) but a rewarding one. Characters known and unknown, real and partially-real, are all absorbing and have interesting inner lives, especially Chaplin and the other "hero" of the story Leland Wheeler, a young man who just wants to get into show business even if he has to do it by training a german shepherd orphan puppy to do tricks and just maybe become famous under the name of Rin Tin Tin.
Gold tells these three main stories without forcing them all together; they are connected to each other in small but tangible ways. All in all "Sunnyside" is a fine novel fro American and European history buffs and those who wonder how human beings can use a plastic medium to both laugh at others and also get prepared to kill them.
"It is not that Design for Living is filled with nudity; there is none. Or foul language; nary a dirty word is to be had–although there is a certain frankness in the use of such ordinary, non-obscene words as “sex” (in terms of the act, not gender) that one suspects to be far more representative of the language uttered by everyday Americans than that of most intra-Code movies.
"No, Design for Living’s taboos are purely of the situational.
"Gilda Farrell (Miriam Hopkins) meets struggling playwright Tom Chambers (Frederic March) and struggling artist George Curtis (Gary Cooper) on a train to Paris. Tom and George are roommates, and both fall in love with Gilda—who falls in love with both of them. When Tom and George realize that she is seeing both of them, they agree to forget her, a promise that quickly vaporizes when she comes to their apartment. Unable to choose between them herself, Gilda makes a pact to be their friend and a muse of sorts to advance their careers—with no more sex."
Well, "no sex." That's the situation by the middle of the film anyway.
"Design for Living" is one of the famous of a certain number of American films in the category of "Pre-Code Hollywood". This covers a period from the first year of nearly full-on sound film features (1929) to 1934, when a man named Joseph Breen, a former official with the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency, was put in charge of the enforcing "The Production Code", a set of parameters of censorship that covered everything from "crime never paying" to making sure men and women slept in separate beds even if married.
The reason for all this, despite the success of these films, was that blue-nosed pressure groups became more and more alarmed by the racy content of American films. Traditional Hollywood studios--run mainly by first and second generation Jewish-Americans who were desperate to incorporate themselves in "the melting pot" of American life, had always been skittish about "going too far" and angering mostly gentile middle American organizations. Most people I'm sure would have loved to keep th movies as they were, but they weren't organized the way church-based groups were.
These changes after 1934 are today generally seen by film historians as detrimental to having strong and independent female characters in movies. Mick LaSalle, critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of "Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood" offers an overview of this period.
"In the pre-Code Hollywood era, between 1929 and 1934, women in American cinema took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, led unapologetic careers, and, in general, acted the way many think women only acted after 1968.
"Before then, women on screen had come in two varieties-sweet ingenue or vamp. Then two stars came along: Greta Garbo, who turned the femme fatale into a woman whose capacity for love and sacrifice made all other human emotions seem pale; and Norma Shearer, who succeeded in taking the ingenue to a place she'd never been: the bedroom. In their wake came a deluge of other complicated women-Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, and Mae West, to name a few. Then, in July 1934, the draconian Production Code became the law in Hollywood and these modern women of the screen were banished, not to be seen again until the code was repealed three decades later."
The career of comedienne and screenwriter Mae West in particular was a target of the puritans, who seem to gather strength against the film industry as the Great Depression wore on and men became more threatened by women due to the loss of their economic status as breadwinners.
Ms. West's fall from official favor was swift not because she lost her way with dialogue writing and delivery but because her use of double-ententes and attitude of not taking male companions seriously was compromised. The star of this film, Miriam Hopkins, was another casualty. Both ladies dropped from their status as Top Ten box-office stars after the kind of pictures the general public wanted to see them in were so altered.
Why did things change so much from the early sound era to 1934? Mick LaSalle, author of "Dangerous Women" offers this assessment.
There was also a loss of reality between man and women in films, especially those who weren't married to each other.
Thankfully in that five year period when sound films were freer from the heavy hand of censorship, some very mature films of redeeming value today were produced, one of those being "Design for Living" an American adaptation of the hit Noel Coward play. The film makes many changes from stage to screen, but the idea of a woman having a sincere regard and attraction for two men who happen to also be friends was too racy no matter how erudite and plain funny the work of Coward was , and how screenwriter Ben Hecht and the great producer-director Ernst Lubitsch could make it sizzle.
Some American films were re-released after the Breen Code went into effect and had to be face cuts to get by the new requirements. But when the head of Paramount Pictures, Adolph Zukor, approached the Motion Picture Board about re-releasing "Design for Living" in 1938, he was told the whole film was a no-go for re-distribution.
It became something of a lost classic for a few decades until retrospective/art house film theaters brought it back for screenings.
Criterion Films released a restored version of the film on DVD in 2011. Seeing it again after a while, I can say it was probably the funniest comedy "released" this last year. Certainly the most enjoyable for me.
In addition to the stars there is some great work by Edward Everett Horton as Max Plukett, a rich American whom Gilda is involved with. He is played as a stuffed-shirt, an over-aged adolescent who pretends he is all for decency and prudery to impress his rich clients back in a hick burg in upstate New York. Mr. Horton played many characters like this in films of this period and the gentle ribbing his type of figure got from the leads (and the writers and directors) in films like this probably was also a factor in getting so many "respectable" Americans on their virtue-bound high horses.
Frank: "Dad, two of the greatest football players in the country hang out in a speakeasy downtown." Professor Wagstaff: "Are you suggesting that I, the president of Huxley College, go into a speakeasy without even giving me the address?"
This was the fourth and arguably the funniest film Groucho, Chico, Harpo (and sometimes Zeppo) did in their cinematic hey-day. To the left you see their success as purveyors of comic anarchy inside the hallowed halls of mythical Huxley College earned then the rare honor for a comic team---a front cover on the nation's most influential news magazine, "Time".
The plot, like most of the Brothers films, defied logic as often as not, but the premise is irresistable. But once Groucho is placed in the position of president of a prestigious American college, one over looks plausibility.
From Imdb: "Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff has just been installed as the new president of Huxley College. His cavalier attitude toward education is not reserved for his son Frank, who is seeing the college widow, Connie Bailey. Frank influences Wagstaff to recruit two football players who hang out in a speakeasy, in order to beat rival school Darwin. Unfortunately, Wagstaff mistakenly hires the misfits Baravelli and Pinky. Finding out that Darwin has beaten him to the "real" players, Wagstaff enlists Baravelli and Pinky to kidnap them, which leads to an anarchic football finale." Written by Rick Gregory <rag.apa@email.apa.org>
What university experience would be complete without some off-campus "tutoring" from the local college widow, especially as soon as her gangster boy friend has his back turned? Or turning a learned but clueless professor or two into straight men for your best one-liners? And winning a big Saturday afternoon football game, even though you're not officially on the team roster?
And most importantly learning the passwords to get into one or two local "speak-easies" (underground locales for illicit drinking during the Prohibition Era.) It's one thing for a nation to be headed into Herbert Hoover's Depression but to do so without the ability to hoist a legal drink in a gin joint or saloon? That's really "Un-American". The Prohibition Amendment was repealed in January 1934.
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The gags in this film come as fast and furious as any film you're likely to have seen. And if you don't laugh at one of Groucho's quips or Chico wordplay or Harpo's masterful pantomime, there will be another set-up and punch-liine coming along in a few seconds that will delight.
. One thing to note about what made "Horse Feathers" so funny is that some of Broadway's best musical comedy writers in this period had come West to Hollywood to write for early talking pictures like these. (The great New Yorker-style writers of humor and satire of that era, men like George F. Kaufman, Morton Ryskind and S.J. Perlman and others of like mind and ready wit more than earned their keep under the palm trees of the new American El Dorado. ) This next clip features President Wagstaff juggling administrative tasks with some dating procedures with Connie, the college widow. She is played by Thelma Todd, a beautiful blond actress who worked well with Groucho in an earlier film "Monkey Business".
A sad coda: Ms. Todd did a number of successful two-reel comedies with the Hal Roach studio where Laurel and Hardy did their best films. She died at 29 in December of 1935, three years after this film. Her body was found beaten in a garage with a running car engine. It is believed by many that Thelma was killed for not being willing to sell her coast-side Santa Monica restaurant/night club to the gangster Lucky Luciano.
Because of fear of Luciano and his East Coast mob--that were then establishing themselves in Los Angeles, no witnesses were willing to testify to that effect and the case was ruled an "accidental death", a very unrealistic verdict.
“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another." -All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 10” ― Erich Maria Remarque
"All Quiet on the Western Front" was a major best -selling novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), focusing on the young (and older) men who are wounded or killed literally due to mechanized warfare. Many were also wounded in the psyche from experiences that seared into them for the rest of their lives. In many ways it is timeless--all the realities of modern "post-traumatic stress" for the returning veterans, for instance, seems totally honest and believable both in the book and the film.
Published in the late 20's it was first set to be made into a silent film by Universal Studios in Hollywood. The popularity of sound films changed that strategy and it was reset for sound. Seeing the film again, one is struck by how raw it all seems--the sound is not smooth as it is in today;s films, and the scenes of battle are not computer-generated but look more real for being depicted by real men in conditions that, while staged, look as one could only imagine they MUST have felt at times to those on the actual front.
Many people who saw this film when it first was released must have wondered how, in less than ten years, Europe would be drawn into another disaster involving even worse death tolls.
The film centers on a young German named Paul who goes to the front in 1916 after getting a patriotic pep-talk to his class by a professor. Germany needs "Iron Men", the teacher tells the class with a bravado that is all ballyhoo and no reality. Many then rush to the recruiting office even before they are to be conscripted.
Some months pass at The front. The optimism of a quick war that had been believed by many on both sides is long over. The front lines are an endless horror. Gas attacks. Futile charges against machine guns. The life among the dead and the shell-shocked and the blinded and suffering. Only with his fellow soldiers in short lulls in the war--where they talk of putting all the leaders of the nations in a ring and letting them fight the war they are stuck in--provide some brief respite for the young man.
On leave, Paul realizes he cannot talk about war to his family or friends in his home town. They have no concept. In the book by Remarque, Paul returns home to his room and the books he read and was inspired by as a young man. They have lost their significance in a world that is torn apart by the reality of war.
In one of the best scenes in the film, Paul later returns on leave to the class with the same teacher and tells the students what war is really like. The film has many great scenes like this, and, thanks to the lax censorship of the times there is a maturity to the film about matters such as sexuality in wartime which are not graphic but refreshingly without prudery.
In a world where leaders on all sides talk rather easily of preparing for conflicts, this material (as a book or a film) is both a relevant and poignant testimony of a human folly that cannot seem to stop.
Those who might be in the mood for an old-fashioned popcorn movie could do a lot worse than to see this one, a behind-the-scenes glimpse of two great talents coming together to make what was supposed to be a light-hearted comedy that had hit written all over it.
Except that it wasn't a hit and shooting the picture was not so light-hearted.
As great as Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe were in their separate careers, they brought little in the way of chemistry to the screen.
Accept that Olivier, the director and star of the 1957 film, "The Prince and the Showgirl", found the often temperamental and always-late Miss Monroe a major pain. Her acting teacher, Paula Strasberg, wife of Lee Strasberg a founder of the "Method" based Actor's Studio in New York City, ran interference between Olivier and his co-star. Her husband at the time, the great playwright Arthur Miller, was caught up in his own problems with her, exacerbated by her finding out she was the main subject of some notes he was making for a play. "She's devouring me," Miller says at one point to Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and soon he flies back to New York City to visit his kids and Sir Larry is left to try and manage her truancy and constant blown lines from the set without any help from home.
One of the best things in the film is watching Branagh (as Olivier) slowly depart from the affable and generous actor-director he purports to be when the project begins and then--a few days into the shooting--realizes that Monroe is both nearly impossible to direct and also quite irreplaceable as far as his producers are concerned. He descends from a patronizing theatrical giant into a small and agitated man mumbling savage lines from his previous screen incarnation as "Richard III".
Adding to his sense of insecurity is that fact that, despite her delaying tactics and neurosis, Monroe's "good days" on the set steal the film away from him. Somehow, in a inexplicable way, she is a natural before the camera, and the damn thing loves her--and that same love eludes him.
The main plot here follows a brief affair Monroe has with an assistant director on the film named Colin Clarke . This throws the whole hierarchy "Larry" and his American producer have carefully set up on its ear. Suddenly a non-entity is the only person on the crew Marilyn will deal with, so make that two indispensable people. Eventually the film gets made. Clarke tries to "save" Marilyn, as all men want to do when this seemingly vulnerable woman lets them into her life, but she things are a lot more complicated than that.
The whole "Olivier/Monroe Flying Circus" movie ends with a rather nice twist and so does the brief and unusual affair between the blond bombshell and young Clarke. The film is based on the latter's 1995 memoir "The Prince, the Showgirl and Me" and all I can say is that if this story is true it's amazing because the whole brief affair plays like a young male's wildest dream. Only the ending has the bite of a real fling.
Michelle Williams as Marilyn is incredible. She might even be better than the original. And that's just her walk!
Anyway, a fun movie for old time film fans, and a break from all the 3-D kid flicks and techno-action films.
Born in San Francisco, California, to Russian emigre parents in 1938, Natalie Wood went on to become one of the few child actors who went on to film stardom as an adult. Her death at 43 left in void in a lot of film watchers hearts--mine included--not because she was simply too freaking beautiful to be beliveved, which she was, but because she seemed to be on the verge of a major third act in her career--from child actor to beautiful ingenue to strong-willed mature woman playing other memorable roles either in films or television.
She made some bad movies to pay the bills with--if you've never seen her as a Russian scientist in a disaster flick called "Meteor" (1980) with Sean Connery and a cast of other name actors getting in a couple days work for a lot of cash--count yourself among the blessed. But there was also signs she was going to be as good as Vanessa Redgrave or Anne Bancroft if you saw her in television films like "The Cracker Factory" (about mental illness) or in the otherwise so-so remake of the wartime drama "From Here to Eternity" (1979) where she literally stole every scene she was in playing a part made famous by Deborah Kerr in the original.
. One just took it for granted that she would be around for a while longer.
Most people my age have their favorite Natalie Wood film (or two). And while as an adult she did everything from serious dramas like "Splendour in the Grass" (1961) with Warren Beatty to madcap slapstick in the overlong but enjoyable "The Great Race" with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, she continued to shine. Even in movies that were forgettable, she wasn't.
Anyway, here's an extended scene from my favorite of her films, "Love With the Proper Stranger" (1963). It's the story of two younger New Yorkers who are nearing the end of their youth and see a future of working-class ennui ahead of them...she's kind of a wallflower in this movie (I know. Natalie Wood as a wallflower??? It's still a Hollywood movie I'm afraid.) The guy in her life is a musician who's scared of settling because he's still sowing wild oats but the clock is running out and he should settle down, maybe. Except the people he knows from his neighborhood who have look so much older and beaten-down then they should be. It's from 1963, but it could have been made forty years later and still be as relevant.
What is a clever twist in this a romance is that they only really start this bumpy relationship off AFTER she comes to him and announces she's pregnant after a one-night stand and he can't even remember sleeping with her. (As someone pointed out on You Tube, how do you not remember sleeping with a girl who looks like Natalie Wood?? I'm guessing LSD.)
You might recognize her co-star.
For me the coolest thing about Natalie Wood is that she was given an award in 1966 as "The Worst Actress of the Year" by the student journalism staff at Harvard University--The Harvard Lampoon--and she actually went in person to the Cambridge, Massachusetts to accept the "award". Sandra Bullock did it too a couple years ago but Natalie was the first.
The Great Escape Sunset Boulevard (Repeated) The Prince and the Pauper The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Flying Leathernecks Pursued Black Angel Pickup on South Street Fallen Angel Giant From Here to Eternity His Girl Friday Pursued Lawrence of Arabia The Great Escape Big Jake Rififi "this is the movie of the bleeding guy driving with the kid in the backseat. It's a French film noir and it's awesome."--CommanderPutney Giant Fallen Angel The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly The Prince and the Pauper From Here to Eternity The Bad and the Beautiful Pickup on South Street Duel in the Sun Top Hat Stalag 17 Casablanca Singin' In the Rain Fallen Angel The Wild Bunch It Happened One Night Black Angel His Girl Friday Murder My Sweet Trouble In Paradise Duel in the Sun The Shop Around the Corner Murder My Sweet Pursued Top Hat From Here to Eternity It Happened One Night My Man Godfrey The Fighting Seabees Casablanca Yankee Doodle Dandy Some Like It Hot Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Stalag 17 Citizen Kane Destry Rides Again Citizen Kane Singin' In the Rain Citizen Kane Destry Rides Again Duel in the Sun The Thin Man Force of Evil Rio Bravo Lawrence of Arabia Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Take Me Out To the Ballgame The Searchers In the Navy East of Eden Robin and the Seven Hoods The High and Mighty In Old California Giant The Godfather There's No Business Like Show Business Top Hat Rio Bravo The Searchers
Not all great movies perhaps but some of the best the studio system ever made plus some great work by maverick directors like Sir David Lean, Sam Peckinpah and Jules Dassin. This will be provide a little finish off to the movie blogs I've done this month. Goodbye August. See you next year, and bring cooler weather.
A collage of film clips of some of the the best work by American and foreign film makers from 1930 to 1970, approx. Music by Igggy Pop and the Stooges. With thanks to Commander Putney of You Tube for the video and Aaran Aardvark for the inspiration.
One of the earliest American feature films (those with a story running in more than 6 reels of film, or about an hour in length) was David Wark Griffith's "The Birth of A Nation". This film, three times the length of any other major American film of its time, was a great technical and narrative achievement. It also sparked a firestorm, and did more than any other to show how the power of the new medium of film could be used to win more people over to a revisionist and one-sided view of history.
Griffith was a Kentuckian, born in 1875, and from his family was taught the "Lost Cause" view of the Civil War, that the cause of the Confederacy had little to do with slavery and more a matter of pure honor. He also learned that the Reconstruction Era (1865-77) had been a disaster for the South, instead of a lost opportunity to lead blacks and white Americans into the beginning of an integrated society.
Instead of focusing on the failures of the Federal Government in not fully supporting educational and economic opportunities for free men and women, Griffith saw the period as one that led to subservience by blacks over whites in a way that was a grotesque distortion of the real suffering and continued oppression of "Aryans", engendered by groups like the Klu Klux Klan. These terrorists were the heroes of the second half of his film.
This remarkable film was done by Charlotte Burger of Tufts University, New York. It is one of the best mini-documentaries I've found on the Internet lately.
Much of the analysis I have about WC Fields is in the first section of this blog (see link above) Here in the second part I want simply to play a couple of his most popular comic sketches. The quality speaks for itself.
(above ) W.C. in a candid shot at a Hollywood party is joined by another timeless comedian, Groucho Marx (sans his trademark greasepaint mustache. ), likely sometime around 1933-4 when they both were under contract with Paramount Pictures.Whatever they are talking about must have been funny.
(below) Fields has a cameo role along with several other Paramount comedians (including George Burns and Gracie Allen) in an early screwball vehicle called 'Six of a Kind" in 1933.
Here he plays small town Nevada sheriff named Honest John. The material here is based on a portion of a vaudeville routine with a special pool table that Fields used in his live act.
Interestingly Fields starred in many silent films although its hard to imagine him without his trademark voice. His first silent film was a knockabout short called "Pool Sharks" in 1915. (See the photo at the top of this page.) The film itself is only of interest as a curiosity for the 35 year old Fields is just a wise guy fighting over a girl with another potential suitor and there's a good deal of trick photography in the pool game scenes. . There's apparently none of that here.
Below: W.C. Fields first starring talking feature, 1934's "It's A Gift". This classic bit inspired a lot of comedians, including John Cleese of Monty Python who worked the idea of a set-upon proprietor into his frustrated English hotelier series "Fawlty Towers". Cleese acknowledged Fields as his favorite sound-era comedian.
Was there ever a comedian more in tune with the dissatisfactions of domestic life in America than one William Claude Dukenfield? Born in 1880 near Philadelphia, he later came to be known simply as W.C. Fields to his legions of fans and later as "Uncle Claude" to his younger friends and just plain Bill to his older peers. His father was an immigrant from Sheffield, England, who went on to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War. His mother was of German heritage.
Yes I do like children ... Girl children...about eighteen or twenty.
'Twas a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it.
Sex isn't necessary. You don't die without it, but you can die having it.
I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast.
The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try, and try again. Then give up. There's no use being a damned fool about it.
Start every day with a smile and get it over with.
A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.
Once ... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days.
I feel like a midget with muddy feet have been walking over my tongue all night.
Madam, there's no such thing as a tough child - if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender.
You're drunk! Yeah, and you're crazy. And I'll be sober tomorrow and you'll be crazy for the rest of your life.
The only thing a lawyer won't question is the legitimacy of his mother.
It's hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the D.T.'s begin.
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Fields began his career in show business as a juggler. He liked to say he ran away form home at 11 or 12 years of age but the truth was he had a talent for "eccentric juggling" and after making a success at talent and church shows around Philadelphia, he took an offer to go on the vaudeville circuit at 18 with the apparent blessing of his parents.
He was such a good juggler that he played not only all over the world in major vaudeville and music hall bookings but in special engagements for European Royalty, including Edward VII and family at Buckingham Palace.
(The clip above is from "The Old Fashioned Way" in 1934. It is the only film clip of Fields' doing one of his complete stage juggling acts.)
Fields was an autodidact and very well-read. Before going on an engagement to Australia he read so much on the young country when he arrived there in 1910 that journalists who interviewed him were impressed that he knew more about the country than most of its regular inhabitants.
Fields married his female assistant, Hattie Fields, around 1900. She grew tired of the constant travel of a stage performer. She wanted Fields to settle down in one place and get a regular job. That was a deal breaker for "Claude Dukenfield" as he was known as a young man. He stayed on tour and his wife and he separated around 1907. They had a son, also named WC Fields, who was estranged from his father during his youth. Fields blamed Hattie for poisoning the young man's opinion of his father. In most of Fields "domestic" films (where he plays the put-upon head of a dysfunctional household) it is always the older women--wives and mothers-in-law-- who are shrewish toward him, a legacy of his unhappy domestic situation.
Fields also started getting roles in legitimate theater around the time he and Hattie separated. He went on to star in "The Zigfield Follies" in the 1920's with such other major stars as Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and Will Rogers. He started appearing in silent films as well, directed by the likes of DW Griffith and his longtime friend Gregory La Cava.
One of W.C.s favorite authors was Charles Dickens. Fields wanderings about in show business as a young man made him identify with the likes of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. One of his favorite roles in films was as a co-star in a 1935 MGM version of "David Copperfield" as none other than Mr. Micawber, a perfect role for him It was the only major role Fields ever played on screen where he didn't try to improve the dialogue of his scenes.
Here's Fields in his 1939 comedy "You Can't Cheat An Honest Man". He plays Larson E. Whipsnade, a carnival owner and reprobate. (This was the other type of role Fields played in films, besides the henpecked husband.) Almost all of Fields comedies were either written by him or in collaboration with others. He used the alias Charles Bogle or Mahatma Kane Jeeves for his gag and scenario writing at the film studios. When Whipsnade's son is about to marry into a high society family, the young man makes the mistake of bringing his iconoclastic father along to a party.
Doubtless a great deal has been said and will be said about the passing of Elizabeth Taylor, a actress frequently cited as "The Last Movie Star".
I think of Ms. Taylor as two major public figures in one person---as a female screen goddess in the time of Hollywood's "Studio System" from the 1940's to the late fifties where it was a giant group of factories turning out proven products, and into the era of independent productions where it took the improvization of talent coming together on one project--preferably a few well-known ones in front of the camera -- to get a film a wide release.
She made many critically successful and big-draw movies in both eras, and just as many unsuccessful ones and critical flops. Her most famous work has been recounted in the last 48 hours many times on television and the newspapers. "Giant", "A Place in the Sun", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", and the notorious "Cleopatra" a film that probably did more to break a crumbling studio system than any other due to cost overruns. (right, a 1952 coloring book featuring the 20 year old starlet)
And yet it created the most popular screen couple of the 20th Century. Wonderfully paradoxical I think.
Liz Taylor was both a superstar of the studio era and also a more post-modern figure as it were, larger than life and then some. A movie star who didn't need to even make movies to be treated as if she were still the biggest name on a marquee.
Consider just two things about her----that she had a long association with diamonds and remarkably expensive jewelery. That's very old school, very chic by mid 20th century standards of conspicuous celebrity glamour. And really shallow. What serious actress today would want to be known as "Miss Diamonds"?
Throw in the yachts and the husbands and the glam outfits; in that way she epitomized the film star who lived like a wandering Queen of Sheba.
But there was also a down-to-earth quality to her, best exemplified in the way she came across in interviews as a no-bulls*** lady who said what exactly was on her mind and in her groundbreaking (by celebrity standards, or perhaps any standard ) work on behalf on bringing awareness about the AIDS epidemic to the forefront in the 1980's and beyond. She occupied a place of high distinction with two separate personas. Not bad for one lifetime. (Below, A tribute from the amFAR organization, narrated by Vanessa Redgrave).
If I had to choose one film that had the most impact on me that she did I would pick 1967's "The Comedians", a quite good adaptation of Graham Greene's novel about foreigners pretending that all is according to Hoyle and straight in the hellhole of authoritarian violence and squalor that was the Haiti of Papa Doc Duvalier. I doubt this film would have reached the audience it did without Burton and Taylor and I have to credit this film getting me interested in Greene's novels and short stories and eye-opening takes on how the world works, especially how people sometimes have to lie to each other and themselves when the truth all around them is the mirror opposite of what they say.
In this scene Richard Burton is a writer who is having a long affair with the wife of a diplomat in Port-Au-Prince. For obvious reasons the film was shot not in Haiti, but in the small nation of Dahomey, now called Benin, in West Africa. It says a lot about their commitment to making this movie that it was shot in a very hot and technically primitive place. It is a story that needed to be told and I give both these actors credit for their social and artistic efforts.
I hope in the afterlife Elizabeth Taylor has a chance to catch up with all those fellow spirits from her life in both these personas (and her private self of course). She was a rare creation in many ways!
For those who might have missed (or avoided) The Academy Awards (Oscars) Sunday Night, here was the highlight of the ceremonies--a two and a half minute montage of the ten films nominated fro Best Picture. From some reason they now nominate ten films for Best Picture, although this doesn't change the fact that only one or two films have a realistic chance of winning the award.
Of the five of these films I actually saw, the three best in my mind were "True Grit", "The King's Speech" and "The Social Network". The British-themed film, the one where Colin Firth displays a remarkable ability to be a bad public speaker, won the top prize.
Do agents of the mighty British Artistic Empire (BAE) have some dark hold over Academy Voters? OK, likely not, not consider this:
From Wikipedia: "To date, eleven films exclusively financed outside the United States have won Best Picture; all eleven were financed, in part or in whole, by the United Kingdom. Those films were, in chronological order: Hamlet, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Tom Jones, A Man for All Seasons, Oliver!, Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Last Emperor, Slumdog Millionaire and The King's Speech
As it featured one of the most sympathetic of the British monarchs, George VI--who had the throne shoved on him by the actions of his (by royal standards) feckless elder Brother David (Edward VIII)--I wasn't surprised, nor were many of the media analysts.
(left to right) actor Dustin Hoffman, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodard,and actor/producer Robert Redford at the premiere of the movie in 1976 in Washington, DC.
While perhaps not the best finest political film ever made in America, the Alan J. Pakula directed "All the President's Men" (1976) might have been the most widely anticipated... and the least disappointing.
The 1974 book on which it was based came out a few months before Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency on August 9th of that same year. Leading up that point were eighteen months of subpoenas, lies and denials from official sources inside the White House.
It was the investigation of a late-night "third-rate burglary" on the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972 and the eventual tie-in to Nixon and his minions behind the special secret "plumbers unit" of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, also known as "Creep) that led to "the greatest Constitutional crisis in America since the Civil War."
The movie itself sets about detailing how two unheralded journalists opened a crack in the inner sanctum of power by establishing a connection between the Mafia-like operations of secret money exchanges and secret slush funds in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. These monies were clandestinly diverted to, among other things, financing "The Plumbers" operations. Nixon knew directly about the break-in a few day later, and instructed H.R. Halderman, his trusted aide, to get the FBI off investigating the case "for the good of the country".
Once the burglars were caught by the police and put on trial, money was needed to buy their silence in court about who they worked for, in effect suborning perjury in a criminal case. Nixon had no problem with that.
"We could get that. On the money, if you need the money you could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done. But the question is, Who would handle it? Any ideas on that?" -- Nixon to John Dean, March 21, 1973.
In the most ironic twist of that era, all was revealed on the audio tapes that Nixon himself made of his phone calls and meetings in the Oval Office
By early 1973 the rest of the media (and, lo and behold, even the Congress!) had begun to sit up and take notice. Senate Hearings were held, chaired by the amiable Democratic Senator from North Carolina, Sam Ervin. I recall they made for much more interesting viewing in the Summer and Fall of '73 then any programing of game shows and local news I'd even seen.
After numerous denials by the inner circle of the White House that the powers-that-be knew anything about a secret money laundering and black-bag operations, one man, Nixon's personal lawyer, John Dean, came forward and spilled the beans on his boss. A lot of other things fell into place after that. Soon Special Counsels appointed by Congress (Harvard professor Archibald Cox and later Leon Jarworski) demanded some of those White House tapes and transcripts be made available for the public to see just how deep in the scandal the White House "men" were.
Nixon fired Cox during the famous "Saturday Night Massacre" on a weekend in October of 1973 and also had to fire two of his Attorney Generals who refused to do the deed. No matter; the wheels of justice ground on. Eventually the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over all documents related to the scandal, including the tapes, a system revealed under oath by Presidential aide named Alexander Butterfield.
Nixon's taping system had "hoisted him on his own petard", as Shakespeare might have said, repeating himself from "Hamlet". Many of Nixon's men went to jail. The Man himself was pardoned by his appointed vice-President Gerald Ford a month after leaving office. Nixon was one step ahead of losing his office (and his pension and other perks) when he quit and likely facing jail before being pardoned. The system had worked, and at least a certain amount of justice served.
But the narrative of this fine film only goes up to the beginning of Nixon's Second term. No matter. Everyone seeing it like me in a theater in 1976 knew what the ending would be already. The end of "Nixonland" in the USA was broken down in a series of camera shots of headlines spiting out on a telex machine--headlines ending with Nixon's resignation as the last piece of news in the film.
I wonder if the modern media really goes in much for investigative journalism these days if there's not a sex scandal involved? Certainly more could have been done to refute the case for the war in Iraq in 2003 for instance. But this film reminds us at least that there was one time in American politics, to quote the newsman Jimmy Breslin, that "the good guys finally won."
Here Robert Redford (as reporter Bob Woodard) gets a strong idea just how far into the Executive Branch this story of five burglars caught at the DNC headquarters might go.
It's perhaps the greatest irony of the whole "Watergate Crisis" that the Democratic party challenger for the top job, the ill-starred Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, or any other nominee would likely have lost the campaign anyway thanks to Nixon's trip to China and the ending of the direct American role in the War in Vietnam.
But Nixon didn't know alll that in 1971, when he unleashed his goons and employed illegal money schemes to try and ensure himself another four years of power.
The first truly iconic figure of moving pictures was born just at the dawn of 1914. Charlie Chaplin, a Cockney music hall performer, was in North America touring with a group of Fred Karno's troupe of comics and acrobats. (The group also included a young man named Stanley Jefferson. He would be known to the world as well in a few years as the Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy fame.)
Seeing Chaplin performing an act playing a middle-aged gentleman drunk in the Karno show, the movie producer Mack Sennett hired Chaplin at 150 dollars a week in 1913. The head of Keystone Studios was not aware his new actor was as young (25) as he was. The idea was for Chaplin to take the place of Ford Sterling, the on-screen leader of his Keystone Cops, a major act in Sennett's stock company. He produced one and two reel slapstick comedies featuring the "Cops" and a pretty female actress and director named Mabel Normand -- at his studios in Los Angeles.
He also wasn't apparently aware how versatile Charlie was, or how just doing knockabout humor was not going to keep his new hireling very happy for long.
Since Sennett couldn't use him as a middle-aged police sargent, so the story goes, the young man needed a different character to justify his salary--and he had to be funny. It didn't take Chaplin long to create one--according to another Sennett actor, Chaplin scoured the wardrobe while he and two other actors were playing cards. One of them, a rotund future star named Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle loaned him a pair of pants much too big for the smaller man. He also put on a morning coat, an ill-fitting vest that was a too small, and a battered derby and equally battered shoes.
The young Englishman fiddled with some costume hair and spirit gum until he got an approximation of a mustache to make him look a little older and slightly pompous. The result of this motley gear, and Chaplin's own affinity for panto-mine and razor-sharp observances of human behavior. He cavorted about on the hotel set of a Mabel Normand film at the studio and drew big laughs from all concerned. Sennett was impressed. How could he not be. He had a star on his hands--a star that would soon leave him for greater creative control than his blustery and crude boss could ever have made full use.
Chaplin, who had spent part of his youth in a south London workhouse, had been in America only a few months and already had created for himself a character that would be world famous by the end of 1914.
Here is Chaplin as the Tramp in his first "screen test", a brief "half reel" film with only two other actors. The crew took advantage of a weekend kids "soapbox derby" racing event to test out "the tramp", or "the little fellow" as Chaplin later called him.
It's a cloudy January day in the a small Los Angeles suburb called Venice. The crowd here is seeing a oddly-dressed man who keeps trying to get in the view of a movie camera, while another crew films the growing anger between crew and pushy bystander. They couldn't have known, even if they figured out the "set-up" for this gag comedy, that they were witnessing cultural history.
In the early Seventies, the Marx Brothers films and their anarchistic collisions with authority in high society, grand shipboard cruises, the halls of government and the groves of academia were very popular on American late-night and sometimes prime-time television. The main surviving Marx Brother, Groucho, was a celebrity above celebrities and could be seen from time to time on talk-shows, expounding his own wit and talking about the great scenes in his films.
The brothers honed their talent on the vaudeville stages of America and Canada.
Oddly enough, when the brothers first played in England, their act, a tried and true spoof of a school room, did not go over well and the audience threw pennies at them! Something didn't translate in the sketch. Later, of course, their stock went up "over there" when the movies came out. .
Otherwise their career was quite successful. W.C. Fields, a comic juggler and no median wit himself, actually refused to go on stage one week in Ohio when he was booked in a vaudeville show with the Brother Marx as the opening act. They literally wore their audiences out with their mayhem. "The only act I could never follow!", the great Fields later said.
The first two of their sound films, including this one, were originally stage plays and were shot in an early sound stage for Paramount studios near New York City. The Marxes, particularly Groucho, ad-libbed so much on stage it drove the writers of the shows around the bend! "Hold on!" the prolific scribe George S. Kaufman said from the wings at a Broadway performance of "The Coconuts" , "I think I heard a line I actually wrote!"
Buoyed by the efforts such great comic writers as Kaufman--who wrote "The Man who Came to Dinner" and many other comic and dramatic hits--as well as the equally famous S.J. Perlman, Harry Ruby and Mort Ryskind, the brothers took to Hollywood where original screenplays were put together at Paramount and later MGM studios to suit their blend of physical and wise-cracking comedy.
Here is one of Groucho's best bits--as the famed but likely fake African great white hunter Captain Spalding in "Animal Crackers". Enjoy.
The Tuscaloosa is a river in the state of Alabama just so you know.
I watched the Academy Awards last night although I had not seen either of the two films ("Avatar", "The Hurt Locker") that were the main contenders for Best Picture. The show is always diverting to me because its basically a live show and people sometimes use the "Oscar Awards" to make some interesting political or social statements about their work. (It also gives me a chance to see which documentaries and short subjects might be worth renting at the local DVD store or looking up here on the computer.)
My favorite Oscar moment goes back a long time. I saw it when I was thirteen and involved that impeccable actor, author and chat-show raconteur David Niven. At the time, for whatever reason, a lot of people were involved in "streaking" in America. They would cast off their clothes and dash about in a public place like at a football game or a college graduation ceremony. It was like the last embers of the 1960's freedom movements dying out before the popular culture turned away from controversy to conformity.
Anyway this is the bit that Niven contributed to that telecast seen 'round the world.
"They may turn their backs on me now, but you wait and see, darling girl...they're going to love me when I'm dead."--Orson Welles to his daughter Christina shortly before his death in 1985.
Welles was a great prognosticator of his own reputation. He was indeed snubbed by a multitude of producers and younger filmmakers (One famous producer-director, who praised Welles to the skies after he died and even bought one of the sleds used as "Rosebud" in "Citizen Kane", refused to help lend any help to the man who inspired him to make his own version of a film based on a famous radio play, according to a book called "Citizen Welles" by Frank Brady.
According to Brady, "The young multi-millionaire even left him to pay the tab at the restaurant they dined in!"
But it might be wrong to blame Mr. Steven Spielberg too much or that--much lesser Hollywood producers did pretty much the same thing. That's why the man who made the greatest film of the 20th Century couldn't direct a film in America after "Touch of Evil" was finished in 1958.
In my first part of this blog, I wrote that I considered Orson Welles, arguably the greatest artist-performer Ameirca produced in the mid-20 Century, was a one man double-act. The American Da Vinci and The Old Fat Man.
The first Welles was the man who was revered as a maverick film director and showman, a tireless entertainer who wrote his own screenplays and television scripts, worked on his own films whenever he made enough money to get a crew together in some location (usually in Europe or Morocco) and financed his work mainly by appearing in commercials and in cameo roles in other director's work.
Then there was the other part of the act: Orson Welles the celebrity Old Fat Man, a sort of sideshow Sir John Falstaff, ironically one of his greatest roles from the movie "Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight" (1965): the man who had to sell everything from frozen peas to photocopiers to cheap domestic wine to make ends meet. He was also the rotund man who did magic tricks on talk shows and seemed to be a walking relic; he was also the butt of jokes by lesser talents like those great American chat show hacks Johnny Carson and Tom Snyder of NBC. It is the second public Welles, I would argue, that was a strange disservice to a man who should have been given more honor in his own land.
Here's Welles hawking wine in what became his most famous endorsement. It would be good to say this work--which he undertook in part to keep his name before the public--earned him a plum job directing a major feature film or at least a part in a film worthy of his stature. But it was not to be.
The second clip is a CBC interview. Although the interviewer is too critical to suit my taste, he does illicit from Welles a frank assessment of his career as he was reaching his older years. What the older man says about his critics is in the main true: he was a prophet without honor in his own country and often in England as well.
The third clip is where "they'll love me when I'm dead" comes true, as he predicted. In 1995, Universal spent a lot of money to restore Welles film noir classic, "Touch of Evil", to the original way he intended it to open, as well as restoring many of his editorial suggestions he made after the film was taken away from him by the original studio bosses.
The clip is a stunning three-minute one-take masterpiece!
It actually made money on its re-release, the first Welles movie to get a decent release in America in forty years. But why couldn't they have done it in 1975 or 1980?
Orson Welles (1915--1985) was always a walking double-act in American pop culture---one part of the act was the recognition that here was a great multi-faceted star who could bend cinematic story-telling to his genius for imagery and montage and dramatic flair.
Exhibit A: Welles from his debut feature, "Citizen Kane", a film about a newspaper tycoon who had a insatiable desire for political and media power. Probably no performer, director, writer and producer came to Hollywood with more expectations than the twenty-three year old Welles did in 1939. And two years later he delivered a masterpiece, but not before arousing the ire of many powerful people and making many older professionals in the factory town that was Hollywood wish he'd fall on his butt and never get up again. Welles had a major ego, and that rubbed many powerful people the wrong way. But he could back it up with a film that no one else could have made. (Which just ticked off many of his peers and a hostile press all the more.)
The other act was Welles as a burn-out case, a guy who popped up on variety shows and did "sthick" comedy or card tricks or added a bit of cosmopolitan flavour to an ordinary documentary or a run of the mill commercial. Sure, folks must have said watching junk like this below, he had done something amazing earlier in his career, something to do with making people think Martians landed in New Jersey back in '38 and really scared people. The "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast put him on the map and he made the cover of Time Magazine, not bad for a guy that young. Here he is lampooning his own past success some thirty year later.
His first feature, "Citizen Kane", was not a successful picture when it was released in the Spring of 1941 (although many critics and fellow artists regarded it as the best film they had ever seen.) Welles carried on for the next forty years, both acting and directing films--often doing such work as he could find of any caliber to finance his projects.
Like the critics and fellow artists said above in the "Kane" clips, all of Welles eight completed directorial efforts leave one in awe of how much he could do with so little.
Here is a clip from his last completed film, "F for Fake" (1976), in which Welles used documentary techniques to get to the heart of how art forgers and other con-artists (like a magician, one of Welles' favorite public guises) fool the public and the experts with a talent for artifice. It is in the middle of this small, wonderful film that Welles gives one of the most moving soliloquies on human creativity.
How Welles carried off this double act for so long is a sort of testament to the need for creativity at whatever the cost. One thing is for certain: Orson Welles overcame adversity and is finally getting the recognition he deserved in life a quarter century after his passing. I'll examine that in my next blog.
