Anytime a 59-year-old man dies, it's a tragedy. And so first and foremost, on that basic human level, I was very saddened to hear of John Hughes's death yesterday. But beyond that, as a film fan, a writer, a journalist (more or less), I've been trying to weigh out what exactly Hughes meant to me as an artist.
There a plenty of people who have expressed their unequivocal love for Hughes's oeuvre as a writer and director (I defer to Drew McWeeny at Hitfix and Massawyrm at AICN), especially those that fall into what can only be described as "A John Hughes film", not only to denote his involvement as a director, writer or producer, but to suggest a tone and setting.
Shermer, Illinois and the pubescent turmoil of high school. The films teeter between adolescent wish-fulfillment (Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) and the slightly more melodramatic tales of misunderstood teenagers (the "trilogy", Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink).
I can't claim to hands down, absolutely adore any one of these films. I'm not sure I completely agree with the numerous assertions that Hughes completely nailed what it is to be a teenager, because let's face it - the aforementioned films are of there time, and therefore, give a tidier reconstruction of adolescence.
Yet, at the same time, there's no denying that these films have affected me - as a writer, a consumer of film and probably as a teenager to some degree. Because all these Hughes films were basically required viewing by the time you were 12-years-old, they inevitably impacted my generation's expectations (for better or worse) of those high school years.
If I'm not falling over in praise for Hughes's work, I'm not condemning it either. In the evolution of the American teen film mythos -- something I've tried to work out for term papers and in my own writing -- Hughes is an essential piece in the puzzle.
Never mind that his films stand above any of the garbage that gets filed under teen film today, or that he was outdone in his own time by Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a film that gives a more realistic, R-rated portrayal of high school (because life, as Judd Apatow once asserted, is R-rated). A "John Hughes film" has become nearly synonymous with those formative years (and also, the 1980s in whole), and whether we agree with it or not, these movies are a part of our cultural language.
Just listen to M83. Or watch Dazed and Confused or Adventureland. Hughes film made his mark. And given everything I've said about not being the biggest fan of any one of his movies, it's rare I'll turn off any one of them when flipping channels.
Blame it on nostalgia for youth or something like that.
Image courtesy of Compton Films/Criterion Collection
Ah Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski's Repulsion - so beautiful, so dangerous. I've blogged and blabbered (albeit briefly) on this film before, so I'll just keep things simple.
The ever-reliable Criterion Collection is releasing (on DVD and Blu Ray) Repulsion on July 28. I wrote a review. Check it out at Suite101.com.
Criterion's great work does tend to come at a price (to be fair, they have to purchase distribution rights, pay for the transfer and correction work and for the special features), so it's always great to catch their stuff on a big sale.
DeepDiscount.com also tends to have a Criterion sale around this time of the year, but nothing has gone up yet (just to prove I'm not a shill for any single outlet).
(Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment via moviemorlocks.com)
Suppose I tell you exactly what's gonna happen to you. You're gonna be back in television. Only it won't be quite the same as it was before. There'll be a reasonable cooling-off period and then somebody will say: "Why don't we try him again in a inexpensive format. People's memories aren't too long."
And you know, in a way, he'll be right. Some of the people will forget, and some of them won't. Oh, you'll have a show. Maybe not the best hour or, you know, top 10. Maybe not even in the top 35. But you'll have a show. It just won't be quite the same as it was before.
Then a couple of new fellas will come along. And pretty soon, a lot of your fans will be flocking around them. And then one day, somebody'll ask: "Whatever happened to, a, whatshisname? You know, the one who was so big. The number-one fella a couple of years ago. He was famous. How can we forget a name like that? Oh by the way, have you seen, a, Barry Mills? I think he's the greatest thing since Will Rogers."
The above monologue (I know, lengthy chunk of text but bear with me) is delivered by Walther Matthau's character Mel Miller, the Vanderbilt-educated TV writer, to the fallen television idol, Arkansas folk-hero turned megalomaniac "Lonesome" Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith in a knockout film debut). Although A Face in the Crowdwas released over 50 years ago as a respone to the death of radio in the face of television, Elia Kazan's film couldn't be any more relevant than it is now.
Video killed the radio star, then the Internet brutally had its way with the remains of both, while taking newspapers, magazines and basically any other form of non-wifi friendly mobile media along too. When I interviewed Carlos Cuaron for his directorial feature debut, Rudo Y Cursi, he talked about the idea of this sort of American Idol/ YouTube-driven culture breeds disposable celebrities - they are, as Cuaron put it, garbage.
And while I don't think Kazan or screenwriter Budd Schulberg were as concerned with the disposability of media sensations as they were their social responsibilities (though as witnessed in the Watthau monologue, it certainly comes up), it's impossible for contemporary audiences not to think of today's quick-fix, empty entertainment when watching A Face in the Crowd. Or at least it should be impossible - I'm pretty certain that the people going out of their way to watch Kazan's masterpiece are the sort who would make that connection.
On the surface, the story follows the classic power-corrupts-the mind/soul structure with Rhodes's unlikely rise from an Arkansas jail to the national spotlight. Under the guidance of an unsuspecting Marcia Jefferies (Particia Neal), Rhodes becomes the no-bullshit voice of the people. He's not the brightest bulb in the pack, but he knows it well enough to exploit his shortcomings and spin them to his advantage. Because what he does have is Southern smalltown charm, a bit of cunning and a guitar.
Warner Home Video brought Kazan's film to DVD in 2005, and the timing couldn't have been any more perfect. Especially as Rhodes moves from advertising shill to political lackey for an up-and-coming conservative Senator, the riffs on image control and the television age combined with Lonseome's Southern dimwit appeal ... well it's downright reminiscent of those recently departed storm clouds we know as the Bush Administration.
Rhodes's racket is TV, but the gross manipulation of the American masses -- the "rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers" or "sheep" as he eventually calls them -- is pure modern politics. Granted he's far more articulate than our most recent former president, but Rhodes is that guy you just want to sit down and have a drink with. At least until fame and money becomes too much.
The predictability of Rhodes's demise is an issue Kazan and Schulberg get away with for several reasons, not the least of which is Griffith's shear magneticism in the lead. Griffith manages to play Rhodes somewhere in between a wolf in sheeps' clothing or a sheep in wolves' clothing. Off the camera, he's a needy, womanizing alcoholic brimming with insecurity, apologizing and pleading all the way to the end.
Still, we never question Marcia's fatal attraction to the media nightmare she inadvertantly unleashed. She is the brains behind the operation, the mostly innocent party who controls Rhodes to the best of her ability, until he just about bursts through his britches. Mel -- who Rhodes initially taunts for his Vandy background (the anti-intellectualism is another connection to the Bush era mentality) -- never professes his love for Marcia, though it's painfully clear. He knows he is dealing with a woman who is tied to something more than an idea - he's competing with an entire failed idyll.
Edward R. Murrow's assessment of television at the 1958 RTNDA convention echoes A Face in the Crowd's deadly view of television's effect on the masses: "This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful."
And, like any weapon, in the wrong hands it can breed "ignorance, intolerance and indifference" rather than fight against it. The shadows and darkness brooding through Harry Strandling's crisp black and white cinematography also lurk in the hearts of the advertisers, programmers, the star and, yes, even the relative innocents like Marcia. For even after Rhodes stabs her in the back (figuratively), she continues to sit in the sidelines and watch. The show, and Rhodes, just seem to suck people in.
Those who continue to fuel the fire are just as guilty as the firestarters, and maybe that's more my read on things and the current sad state of entertainment than what we actually see in A Face in the Crowd. But in an age of micro-blogging (full disclosure: I have a Twitter page ... doesn't make me proud about it, but what can you do?), recyclable YouTube stars, Celebrity Fit Club and all that other mind-rotting shit, Kazan and Schulberg's lesson on the power of celebrity image is one you can't help expanding on.
Is that what makes A Face in the Crowd great cinema? I'm not sure if I can answer that. The film is beautifully shot, impeccably acted and the story carries you along from beginning to end. Kazan and Schulberg probablly didn't have a clue just how prophetic the film would be, but that's how things usually work out. When George Orwell wrote 1984, he said he wasn't writing about the future - he was writing about the present, and my guess is that's how Schulberg felt when he wrote the short story and then adapted it into A Face in the Crowd.
Youcould say (and many people have) that On The Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden are all timeless films, if not the indistubatle widely-recognized Kazan masterpieces. But A Face in the Crowd feels made for the here and now, and however inadvertantly, manages to comment on our current social condition more than any of those aforementioned classics.
Does that make it the best film of the bunch? Probably not, but that doesn't make it any less essential.
And now, I defer to YouTube, a weapon I strive to use for good and not for watching Pandas sneeze or whatever.
(Image courtesy of Republic Pictures via http://cinemacc.files.wordpress.com)
If there were ever an American classic sorely in need of a home video revival, it would be The Magnificent Ambersons (Criterion, are you there? It's me - Zach). However, continuing down that priority list, somewhere not too far from the top resides Nicholas Ray's upheaval of the classic Western, Johnny Guitar.
Ray was a master of subverting genre and playing it cool under the Hayes Production Code, or later on, what was left of the Code in the mid-to-late 50s (see Rebel Without A Cause). The censors were always a little slow on the uptake when it came to Freudian psycho-sexual allusions, and Ray's work is loaded with repressed, dark tension. As a result, years later his films don't feel quaint and scrubbed clean in the way that even some of the greatest films from the same period are.
For any viewer with even the most casual knowledge of the classic Hollywood Western picture, Johnny Guitar stands out from the get go. As Sterling Hayden's titular character rides into a valley, a mountain range explodes. He then moves on to watch a stagecoach robbery and shooting, which the posited hero glimpses with little reaction. We are introduced into a world of chaos where the rules of the game no longer apply.
Our symbolically impotent hero carries a guitar, not a gun, and turns out to be not much of a hero at all. Good guys and bad guys are completely relative in Johnny Guitar - morally, we don't have much room to side with the law or the outlaws, which sort of disrupts the continuity for those who argue the film as an allegory for the McCarthy-era witch hunts. It's definitely there to some degree, but Ray isn't building up anyone to be 100 percent innocent of anything.
Joan Crawford's Vienna calls Johnny to her casino/pub joint in a frontier town under the auspices of needing entertainment for the place. Really, she's looking for protection from a long lost lover (don't worry, it's really not much of a spoiler). Vienna is caught in the throws of a Shakespearean stand off with Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) , John McIvers (Ward Bond) and what seems like the rest of the town. Partially, the feud is financially related, but much of Emma's deep-rooted hatred for Vienna comes from her inability to deal with her love for the Dancin' Kid (Scott Brady), a local outlaw with his eyes on Vienna.
The HUAC undertones come in as Emma tries to pin her brother's murder on Vienna (via her association with the Kid and his gang). If it sounds like I'm leaving out Johnny Guitar, it's because the title character is largely absent from his own film. As he confesses toward the beginning of the film, "I'm a stranger here myself." Johnny is largely cut from the action in deference to Vienna, his old flame. Traditional male heroism is continually undercut by a stronger female presence - it's something the men in the film never really come to terms with, mostly because the women won't allow them to.
Thematically, Johnny Guitar cooks up many of the ideas Ray would visit again in Rebel Without A Cause. Even in 1954, Ray sensed a paradigm shift in American values. He was a bit ahead of his time with Johnny Guitar, and as a result, the film's reception was pretty mixed in America. It's no surprise Variety didn't know whether to make heads or tails of the film. It's jarring. Everything that "should" happen in a Western generally doesn't, or at least happens in a very different way. Ray inverts the rules.
Some of Ray's most ardent contemporary support came from the young French critic Francois Truffaut, and it's easy to see why Truffaut and other future New Wavers dug so hard on Ray and Johnny Guitar (Truffaut called it the "Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream"). What the New Wave would do for the gangster film (Breathless, Shoot The Piano Player), Johnny Guitar at least partially does for the Western. The genre mold is there, barely, but within that structure, the language is completely different - far more poetic, far less literal.
There's plenty of lyricism in John Ford's masterpieces, but none of Ford's films is as truly bizarre as Johnny Guitar. I realize that's not necessarily a flat out endorsement, and I'm certainly not going to make any bullshit claim that Johnny Guitar is a masterpiece in league The Searchers or Stagecoach. But Ray's film is a wrongfully overlooked and influential chapter in the Western pantheon. In the very least, I think that warrants a proper DVD release.
(Image courtesy of the Criterion Collection via http://members.quicknet.nl/ahum/M20%20in%20the%20movie1.htm)
After seeing the later Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger (a.k.a. The Archer's) classic, The Red Shoes, and reading up a little on Scorsese's high opinion of Powell's work, I purchased The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp on a whim. Why this film hasn't enjoyed a reputation equal to Renoir's Grand Illusion as one of the greatest cinematic critiques of war, I really can't say. As I said with The Fallen Idol, British cinema gets overlooked too often in America.
Taken from the popular, farcical British cartoon character, Colonel Blimp, Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) is the ostensibly unchanging face of the British military. From his younger days in the Boer War, Candy matures in a series of conflicts which shapes his expectations for how a war is to be properly conducted. It is a gentleman's game with carefully observed rules. When one party deviates from the script and does something unsportsmanlike, as the Germans do in WWI, it is only fitting that the behaved party emerges victorious.
As Candy's German friend and foil, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) represents a much more flexible view of war. He too is brought up on the idyll of a gentleman's war -- it is this principle that first brings him into contact with Candy, dueling against his personal belief to defend the honor of the German Army, who Candy offends while visiting Berlin at the turn-of-the-century. It is there that both men meet Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr), the woman Theo marries and Candy longs for throughout his life.
Given that the film was released in 1943 -- in the throws of the second World War -- Powell and Pressburger (credited as screenwriters on the picture as well) tackle the evolution of war with an inredibly prophetic scope. Even a fair and balanced criticism of the British Army in a film that is neither blindly patriotic nor scathingly treacherous could not be accepted at the time. Winston Churchill despised the film and wanted to see it banned. But that sort of knee-jerk reaction completely ignores the valuable criticism of war and British culture Powell and Pressburger offer.
Nazism, aside from being the ultimate evil, represents a complete end to the gentleman's game. Candy remains confident through the end of WWI that the Germans lost because they refused to play by the rules. His view of war running like clockwork already seems antiquated then, but when taken in with the full, horrific implications of the Nazi regime, Candy's idylls are entirely invalid. His friend Theo notes that the British are no longer fighting to win -- they are fighting for their entire "existence." And should they lose, there will be no other values but Nazi values for a very long time.
Beneath the political skepticism (Kerr delivers one of the film's best lines: "Good manners cost us . . . 6,000 men killed and 20,000 men wounded—and two years of war. When with a little common sense and bad manners there would have been no war at all.") and razor sharp dialogue, Powell and Pressburger also deliver one of Technicolor's early masterpieces. While their color cinematography is not quite as inspired as in The Red Shoes, their work alongside DP George Périnal (who worked on The Fallen Idol) is no less assured, from the opening shot of the M20 motorcycle (which seems to have informed David Lean in the opening of Lawerence of Arabia) which pulls out to reveal the British Home Guard in all its pomp and splendor.
What makes it all work is The Archer's decision to transform Blimp from a contemptible joke -- a chararicature -- into Candy, a full-blooded tragic figure. He's still bound, like Blimp, to the old guard's failing ways, but there's a profound sadness to the demise of how things were. They handle their satire with absolute sincerity, though not without a sense of humor.
The title of the film could be seen as misleading -- we never see Blimp/Candy's onscreen death. In fact, the film ends with him very much alive. But that would be an all too literal reading of "Life" and "Death". At the film's conclusion, Candy finally recognizes just how much the world around him has changed. England is no country for old gentleman soldiers, and while this evolution is inevitable, The Archers seem to mourn this passing, despite the absurd decadence and contradictory idea of so-called civilized war.
(Image courtesy of Warner Bros. via www.moviewallpapers.net)
All due respect to Casablanca, but Michael Curtiz was a goddamn hack. Maybe that's a bit strong considering all I've seen of his work is the aforementioned classic and Mildred Pierce. For all his competence on Casablanca though, Curtiz damn near capsizes Mildred Pierce, an otherwise pleasing melo-noir.
Hats off to Joan Crawford in the titular role - she carries the film from beginning to end. Pierce sacrifices everything for her family, specifically her eldest child, the class-conscious, money-grubbing snob Veda (Ann Blyth). She takes a job as a waitress, which Veda resents as socially unacceptable, and eventually builds a successful restraurant mini-empire. Despite the accomplishment, Veda still looks down at her mother for working at all. How, exactly, Vera got these upper-class pretensions, we never really know (it's something that may have been lost in adapting James M. Cain's novel).
Even as Curtiz undermines the drama (more on that later), Crawford sells the tragedy of the woefully unappreciated mother. Ranald MacDougall's tight dialogue gives Crawford and co-star Jack Carson (Wally Fay, Pierce's business partner and one of her suitors) plenty to chew on, though the narrative construct (too much noir flashback and narration) feels a bit dated.
The structure allows the film to toy with the idea of femme fatale a little, especially in the juxtaposition of mother and daughter -- although there's not much in the way of contemplation on the noir figure. Really it's more of a ploy, albeit a pretty good one.
Where the film suffers is in the directorial/editorial department. It's no wonder Crawford won an Oscar for her turn in the film, but it's downright baffling how Curtiz and cinematographer Ernest Haller (Rebel Without a Cause) ended up with nods.
It's not just that Curtiz lacks any recognizable style - he undermines the drama with poor composition and editing. One can only imagine how much better Mildred Pierce could have been in the hands of Howard Hawks, who knew how to work magic on studio supervision. Curtiz's camera and cutting pattern move either too predictably or haphazzardly.
Each dolly in or out punctuates exactly when it you would expect it to. Rather than letting the action breathe within the frame, Curtiz (or Warner Bros., who may have been manning the puppet from behind the scenes) feels the need to break down each sequence with unecessary close ups, punctuating all the easy moments.
Without giving too much away, here's a pretty right on example. One character remains sick in bed, dying, with an oxygen tent around her. The POV shot from inside the tent is powerful -- we're isolated, trapped within the apparature. But when the reverse comes and Pierce runs to the character, we lose her in sight as she comes around the corner. At first, it appears as if Pierce's interaction with the character will occur off-screen -- an unusual and interesting choice for a studio film. However, Curtiz cuts back to a variation on the original shot, and then back to the reverse. The moment gets lost and segmented by adhering to the shot-reverse-shot convention, and to greater detriment, bad composition. It's a pivotal scene, or at least it should be, because for Pierce, it's a turning point.
I know it comes down to a question of preference, but I do not understand how critic Andrew Sarris can file directors like Carol Reed, Elia Kazan and John Huston under "Less Than Meets the Eye" and dub Curtiz "Lightly Likeable". When a lamp placed in the foreground blocks a character's movement in Mildred Pierce, it's doing just that and serves no other purpose.
Having ranted and raved, I still don't regret having seen the film, if only for Crawford's performance. Why this film enjoys such reverence (Amazon deems it "essential" for what it's worth), I have no clue. For my money, Out of the Past is a far stronger post-war melo-noir.
One last note -- Mildred Pierce is sort of atypical in the noir canon for its strong female lead. This could be interpreted as somewhat progressive given the time period. However, it is worth noting that Pierce, when interrogated by the police, admits divorcing her first husband, Bert, (Bruce Bennett) was a mistake. Bert who had lost his job, seemed reluctant to get a new one, admitted to detesting Veda and was openly cheating on Mildred with another woman. Given the mess Mildred's life becomes after the divorce, I guess this is somewhat understandable. Still, it rubs me the wrong way.
Don't have much time for this post, nor do I want to go at any great lengths in case I end up doing a full DVD review. But if you've seen Repulsion, Roman Polanski's first English-language feature, then you know - this one requires some discussion.
I regret having seen Robert Altman's Imagesa few months ago (well, not really "regret" per say) and not after having seen Repulsion. While Images is not one of Altman's most successful/accessible/overall enjoyable films, it's sort of a clarification of the themes of isolation and female sexual repression Polanski sets forth in Repulsion.
Polanski's film isfar from perfect or steady, but it is genuinely disturbing in its portrayal of confinement and madness. Beautiful composition, startling effects (the hands groping through the walls really predicts/informs all those wonderful Cronenbergian creepers) ... oh, and did I mention a quietly crazed performance from Catherine Deneuve?
Ah, I've said too much already. So, lest I trample all over a possible forthcoming review, I will leave with this. Something to brighten up your day ...
Been catching up a lot on stuff I've been DVR-ing off of Turner Classic Movies and I was pleased as hell to come across this Carol Reed gem, one of I've been meaning to get around to for quite some time.
The first of three collaborations Reed did in with novelist/ screenwriter Graham Greene, The Fallen Idolis one of those rare films that really nails how a child perceives the world around him. In this case, that child is Phillipe (Bobby Henrey), the son of the French ambassador to England. With his mother away, sick for months (Phile confesses he doesn't remember her all that well and his father visibly detached), Phile's surrogate parents at the embassy, Baines (Ralph Richardson) and Mrs. Baines (Sonia Dresdel) look after him.
All Freudian psychosexual undertones aside -- and there are plenty throughout Fallen Idol -- the film really works best at establishing Phile's loose (and malleable) grasp on morality. As Baines tells him, in the presence of Mrs. Baines, "There are lies and then there are lies."
This becomes all the more troubling for Phile when he stumbles upon Baines and his young lover Julie (Michèle Morgan), an embassy secratery. Baines insists to Julie that the child doesn't understand, and later secures a promise from Phile that he won't mention anything to the Mrs.
Reed, along with ace cinematographer George Périnal, turns the embassy into a dutch-tilted playground of wonder and, eventually, horror. As the little lies beget larger ones, Phile does all he can to surpress the doubt he begins to show toward Baines, the titular Idol of the film.
The final denouement, for all the build up, winds down a bit too quickly and tidily in contrast to the carefully sustained tension throughout the rest of the film. It's probably more the film's narrowed scope than its minor structural issues that have resulted in the film's relative obscurity to American audiences, especially in comparison to the next Reed/Greene collaboration, their pulsing masterpiece, The Third Man.
But where Fallen Idol cannot match The Third Man (performance, score, set pieces, Orson Fucking Welles) , its universal themes of truth, morality and shattered innocence may actually come out stronger without The Third Man's post-WWII frame of mind dating them. As always with Greene, nationalism still plays a role (there's quite a bit of French-British pull-and-tug, especially when language comes into the picture). However, it's more of a background motif to the foreground of a child's discovery of sin.
This one comes highly recommended, especially for any Hitchcock fans out there. Like his British contemporary, Reed understood the power of meticulous composition and the importance of air-tight pacing. He's not as flashy as Hitchcock, but at his best, no less of a filmmaker.
Image courtesy of Universal Pictures
