by John Grant

US / 91 minutes / bw / Columbia Dir & Pr: Leo McCarey Scr: Viña Delmar Story: The Awful Truth (1924 play) by Arthur Richman Cine: Joseph Walker Cast: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, Alexander D’Arcy, Cecil Cunningham, Molly Lamont, Esther Dale, Joyce Compton, Robert Allen, Robert Warwick, Mary Forbes, Kathryn Curry, Miki Morita, Asta.

One of the first screwball comedies and among the best, this has at its core the romantic story of the realization by an unfaithful husband that, in point of fact, it’s his wife whom he loves the most, alongside her realization that, despite his infidelities, she loves right back. It’s based on a play that was earlier filmed as a silent in 1925, dir Paul Powell, with Agnes Ayres, Warner Baxter and Raymond Lowney, and as a now presumed lost talkie in 1929, dir Marshall Neilan, with Ina Claire, Henry Daniell and Paul Harvey. A later musical reworking was Let’s Do It Again (1953) dir Alexander Hall, with Jane Wyman, Ray Milland and Aldo Ray. I haven’t seen any of the other adaptations, alas, so I can’t draw any comparisons.

The version under discussion here betrays its stage origins in that it’s made up of a number of discrete scenes; those scenes are often almost independent set pieces, or sketches, so the movie comes to have a cellular structure along the lines of, to use a much later and highly dissimilar example, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975): a string of sketches is linked together by an overarching plot. Rewatching the movie after a long interval—approaching half a century, I think—I found that, aside from the general plot, which I vaguely recalled, I was greeting some of the scenes/sketches as old friends while others I’d entirely forgotten. Some of the characters appear in a single scene/sketch and then vanish from the story, such as the Warriners’ maid Celeste (Curry) or—although there’s a major caveat in this instance—the scandalous dancer Dixie Belle Lee (is her name a nod to Gypsy Rose?). A couple of scenes/sketches could have come from a musical. The net effect is that we end the movie feeling as if we’ve enjoyed a—very satisfying—evening of variety (near-burleyQ) entertainment rather than a single offering.

Rich playboy Jerry Warriner (Grant) returns home, supposedly from a trip to Florida but quite apparently from a fling, to find that his wife Lucy (Dunne) has spent the night away from home in company with her music teacher, the dashing Armand Duvalle (D’Arcy). She maintains it was merely a matter of an automobile breakdown (“You’ve come home and caught me in a truth, and there’s nothing less logical than the truth”); Jerry, however, either genuinely suspecting the worst or merely attempting to deflect attention from his own duplicity, makes a deal of it, and the next the couple know they’re talking divorce. The court grants an interlocutory decree of divorce, which will become final within 90 days.

And then comes a brief but memorable sketch as the couple argue over who should have custody of their Asta-like terrier, Mr. Smith . . . in fact, not so much Asta-like but actually played by Asta! The judge decrees that the dog himself must be the one to decide, and the couple are set up with Mr. Smith between them: whoever he goes to first wins him. It’s an appealing piece of silliness, not least because Lucy wins by cheating.

Lucy takes an apartment with her acerbic, worldly wise aunt, Patsy Adams (Cunningham); oddly, Lucy alone calls her not Patsy but Patty throughout. Aunt Patsy urges her to move on with her life, and even does the heavy lifting by picking up a man on her behalf: Dan Leeson (Bellamy), an amiable, seemingly kindly but deathly unimaginative Oklahoman who’s made his fortune in oil and is visiting the Big City with his mother (Dale) but doesn’t plan to stay. Whether it’s his dough or the rebound effect or just an urge to show Jerry a thing or two, soon there’s talk of engagement in the air—even though Mrs. Leeson cannot hide her suspicions of her prospective daughter-in-law, especially when she picks up some juicy gossip about a certain French music teacher . . .

Jerry, despite professed delight at his imminent freedom and his frequent shows of goodwill toward the couple, is immensely jealous. To demonstrate to Lucy that he’s not without his own attractions, he allows her and Dan to come across him dating a much younger chanteuse, Dixie Belle Lee (Compton), in the nightclub where she’s a headliner. Dixie Belle comes across as an absolute sweetheart as she explains that she operates under a stage name because her conservative mother believes that somehow singing isn’t really a job. The three agree to wait for her act . . . which, when it comes, is sufficiently outrageous that Jerry is soon hurriedly blurting, “I’ve only just met her.” The performance and the trio’s reaction to it comprise one of the funniest set pieces in the movie. As Dixie Lee sings a woesomely trite song about the old cottage that was home, every now and then she encounters the phrase “gone with the wind” or some equivalent, at which point an under-stage fan blows her dress up over her shoulders, revealing—gasp!—her smalls. Says Lucy tartly: “I guess it was easier for her to change her name than for her whole family to change theirs.” The real joke, though, is that Compton exudes such bubbly innocence throughout that the display is absolutely innocuous.

Later in the movie, when Jerry is lining himself up to become engaged to fabulously rich and very pretty heiress Barbara Vance (Lamont), there’s a reprise of Dixie Belle’s performance. Through circumstances, Jerry has had to pretend that Lucy is his sister. At a soiree where he’s trying to impress Barbara and his inlaws-to-be (Warwick, Forbes), Lucy—as “sister Lola”—makes an entrance and, after publicly puncturing a few of Jerry’s bubbles of pretension, proceeds to emulate Dixie Belle’s “My Dreams are Gone with the Wind”; she doesn’t have an under-stage fan, of course, but, in a quite brilliant piece of physical comedy, Dunne manages to give the impression of her skirt being blown up around her hips. This rendition alone is worth the price of admission. Not only is it very funny—Dunne was one of the screen’s great comediennes—but it’s funny in a quite different way from the Dixie Belle version. Where Dixie Belle’s naivety and all-around wholesomeness made her performance seem gloriously innocent, as if we were laughing at a child who’d triumphantly jumped in a puddle, Dunne’s imitation does carry a sexual charge. And that charge affects her viewers differently: the stuffy Vance parents (and their daughter) are appalled by such a display while Jerry receives a not-uncertain message about the delights he’s planning to abjure.

By this time Dan’s out of the picture after the events of another raucously funny sketch—perhaps the movie’s most ambitious. Here we have all the groundwork for the kind of bedroom farce that two or three decades later would start to make London’s Whitehall Theatre internationally famous. We’ve noted Jerry’s inappropriate jealousy. With Dan he can control it, but his wrath still boils for the suave music teacher Armand. We’ve already seen him indulge in some knockabout slapstick when interrupting what he assumed would be a tryst between Armand and Lucy but proved instead to be a po-faced salon recital, Lucy singing and Armand accompanying on the piano. (Eventually Jerry’s chair collapses under him; Lucy’s smile-turning-to-laughter as she realizes how much she loves him is arguably the movie’s single most romantic moment.)

Now Armand comes to visit Lucy to tell her there’s no need for apology. When Jerry arrives, Armand slips into her bedroom out of sight, to avoid confrontation . . . but inadvertently leaving his bowler hat behind. Jerry arrives wearing a bowler of his own (nowhere else does Jerry wear a bowler; again, we feel we’re watching a string of brilliant sketches rather than a unitary piece), and there’s an elaborate routine involving the two bowler hats and a hide-and-seek game with Mr. Smith. Lucy somehow manages to allay any suspicions Jerry might have. But then Dan arrives with  mother in tow. Before Lucy can stop him, Jerry has slipped into her bedroom to keep out of sight of Dan. The fight that ensues when Jerry finds Armand already there nixes any plans Lucy might have had of wedding Dan, who assumes she’s enticed to her boudoir not one but two former lovers . . .

The final sketch is yet another brilliantly conceived piece of cinema. Jerry and Lucy find themselves stranded for the night in adjoining rooms at Aunt Patsy’s remote country lodge (don’t ask). The wind is up, and the intervening door occasionally blows open, betweentimes rattling in uncanny imitation of that distinctive noise you hear through the wall of a motel bedroom. As the minutes tick down toward midnight, the moment when the couple’s divorce finally becomes absolute, Jerry more than once comes to the door to close it, each time seeing his soon-to-be-ex-wife languishing yet more desirably in her own bed. (There’s a certain amount of Barbara Stanwyck in Dunne’s performance in this movie, but it’s hard to imagine that Stanwyck would have allowed herself to look so blatantly, well, fuckable as Dunne does here.) By way of accompaniment, the quarter-hours are being sounded by a Swiss clock: at each chiming, a male and a female figure emerge from two doors in the clock face . . . until finally, when Jerry comes to the obvious conclusion about his own fatheadedness, the male figure crosses the divide and follows the female into her door.

Which firmly shuts as the closing credits begin. Also, as it happens, that last sounding of the clock was for midnight, so really what’s going on unseen by us has just become technically extramarital. It’s lucky for Middle America that it survived this onslaught of immorality.

I think it was Bergen Evans who once observed that the merest milquetoast, if married, likely has a more imaginative and varied sex life than do most Casanovas. This seems to be one of the prime messages of The Awful Truth, a piece that’s quite astonishingly preoccupied with sex. (It’s a tribute to the charm with which this is conveyed that the movie didn’t run afoul of the Hays Code.) The romance that lies at its core is married romance. Jerry has made the classic error of believing the grass on the other side of the fence is greener; his sexual fling at the movie’s outset is a betrayal not just of Lucy but, even more fundamentally, of himself. Perhaps the girl was younger and prettier, perhaps he needed to prove himself to himself as adolescent males so often do—and much as later he tries to prove himself to both himself and Lucy by knocking around with the younger and arguably prettier Dixie Belle and Barbara (and the latter even has pots of money!). Whatever the case, we can assume the fling was a pursuit of sex perpetrated in defiance of the romance Jerry has in his marriage.

It’s Lucy who, post-interlocutory decree, first spots how confoundedly sexy her spouse is—confoundedly sexy not because of himself (viewed dispassionately, he’s a self-absorbed klutz) but because she sees him in the context of their romance, a romance that’s ongoing whether they’re aware of it or not. It takes Jerry a while longer to recognize that his acts of jealousy aren’t just products of a petty possessiveness but defensive reactions to the threats the unacknowledged marital romance faces. When he finally sees (and we see through his eyes) how scintillatingly sexually alluring his wife is, as she lies in her bed in the cabin, it’s because the cloud that he has permitted to cover the light of their romance has finally been blown clear. Sex is a pretty damn’ fine thing, the movie seems to be telling us, but there ain’t no sex can compete with the sex we have within a romance.

The theme of a married couple suffering some kind of a fission such that the two parties are on the brink of marrying others before discovering that in reality they belong best to each other was a recurring trope in Hollywood’s golden age, mostly as inspiration for comedy romances. In My Favorite Wife (1940), which has the same director and stars as The Awful Truth, Dunne’s character is presumed dead but returns to civilization immediately after the marriage of her supposed widower husband (Grant) to another (Gail Patrick); discovering the truth, he postpones the consummation . . . to great comic effect. This was remade as Move Over, Darling (1963) dir Michael Gordon, with Doris Day, James Garner and Polly Bergen in the appropriate roles. In The Philadelphia Story (1940) dir George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn’s character falls in love all over again with her ex-husband (Grant once more). In That Uncertain Feeling (1941) dir Ernst Lubitsch, Merle Oberon’s character divorces her husband (Melvyn Douglas) in favor of another man (Burgess Meredith) before realizing that in truth she still loves her existing husband. In Random Harvest (1942), a rare drama to utilize the theme, an ex-serviceman (Ronald Colman), rendered amnesiac through shellshock, almost marries a much younger woman (Susan Peters) while oblivious to the fact that his secretary (Greer Garson) is his real wife. There are plenty of other examples.

But The Awful Truth is arguably the best of them. Audiences at the time thought so too—as did the Academy. McCarey won an Oscar as Best Director and the movie was nominated for five others: Best Picture, Best Actress (Dunne), Best Supporting Actor (Bellamy), Best Screenplay and Best Editing (Al Clark). In 1996 the National Film Preservation Board added it to the National Film Registry as a movie of historical importance. It was a career-maker for Grant, who hereafter would carry the same persona through most of his screen roles. It put the screwball comedy on the map. And it still gives us a chance today to see that irrepressible, irreplaceable comic genius Irene Dunne at the height of her powers.

by Sam Juliano

The ABCs of opera.  Aida.  Boheme.  Carmen.  This triptych expression has come to denote not only the essentials for a newcomer to the form, but also the most pared down assessment of these three quintessential works that continue to rate among the most performed operas year after year worldwide.  The middle of the three, Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 La Boheme may well have emerged the most popular opera of all-time over the past ten or fifteen years if we further examine some telling statistics.  Certainly there can be little doubt that it is the most perfectly composed of the composer’s works, and the one that boasts the most clarity of structure.  It is also (along with Carmen) one of the two most frequently mentioned operas by musicologists to have made converts of non-believers of the form.  La Boheme is the perfect choice for one’s first introduction to opera, whether in attendance at the opera house, via HD broadcast or on an audio CD.  Charming, sublime, lyrical, sentimental and suffused with soaring emotions, this four-act work of moderate length (by opera standards) is finally unbearably poignant, but along the way it showcases some of the most beautiful music ever written.  Puccini’s incomparable melodic felicity -often attacked back in the day as shameless and ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve – by the cynics, is now regarded as old-fashioned melody-making that very few have been able successfully emulate.  Though the composer crafted several operas that border on master-class (Turandot, La Fanciula de West, Manon Lescaut, Gianni Schicchi -the latter contains the beloved suprano aria “O Mio Babbino Caro” while the first-mentioned features the electrifying tenor standard “Nessun Dorma”) La Boheme is one of the three unquestioned masterpieces (Tosca and Madama Butterfly are the others) that have beguiled and ravished opera goers for many decades, and no doubt will continue to do so well into the future.

In 1890 Giacomo Puccini was basically just another impoverished Italian composer, one of many jockeying to reach poll position as heir apparent to the great Verdi.  His very first opera enjoyed moderate success, but the second was an unmitigated failure.  This led the opera critics of the day to write early obituaries for the young upstart from Lucca, before he astounded them with his breakthrough work Manon Lescaut three years later.  It was the first of what were to be four collaborations with the librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica.  This turned out to be a working relationship wrought with disputes, complaints and multiple near-break ups, yet through some stroke of luck they persevered to produce four of the most enduring operas of all-time, starting with the aforementioned Manon Lescaut.   Puccini had been hunting for a subject for months before he discovered Henri Murger’s Scenes de la vie de Boheme, a novel based on the author’s irresponsible  youth while becoming an artist.  Together with Illica and Giacosa, Puccini labored for three years  to transform the material into its final dramatic form.  Along the way there were many revisions – Illica and Giacosa were often exasperated – but stayed on, and Puccini worked hard to better another version of the opera that was being composed by friend and rival Ruggero Leoncavallo.  Puccini’s version bettered it by quite some distance,  and the noted verismo style seemed a much better fit that the light comedy of the first act that Leoncavallo composed.  No other art is so attuned to fleeting romanticism like opera.  Fleeting in the sense that the moorings of most operatic works are steeped in passionate love affairs that invariable end in tragedy.  Most of the dying characters are women of a young age, though mutual demise is another theme explored regularly.

 In their gloomy Latin Quarter garret in Paris, the practically destitute artists Marcello and poet Rodolfo try to stay warm on Christmas Eve by feeding the stove with pages from Rodolfo’s drama.  They are soon joined by their roomates – Colline, a young philosopher, and Schaunard, a musician, who brings food, fuel and funds. Benoit, their landlord enters to ask for the rent, but they skillfully evade him.  As the others depart Rodolfo stays behind to complete an article, promising to catch up with them imminently.  A young and timid seamstress Mimi shyly knocks at the door to ask for a light for her candle.  Rodolfo is charmed and proceeds to prolong the encounter; he tells her about himself, and shares with her his dreams of love in one of the most rapturous and progressively romantic tenor arias in all of opera, “Che gelida manina” (Your tiny hand is frozen…what an icy little hand, let me warm it……Who am I?  I am a poet……I have no worldly riches, but every poem is a treasure.  So in poverty I am a millionaire.  Mimi in turn introduces herself, describing her loneliness and attic lodgings, proceeding to deliver one of the most poetic and lilting soprano arias in all of opera, “Mi chiamano Mimi” (They call me Mimi……yes they call me Mimi, but my name is Lucia.  My story is short.  I make my living by sewing and embroidering.  I am quiet and cheerful….I live in a little garret room overlooking the sky.)   Mini’s simple, and powerfully impassioned proclamation to the sun and the April spring:

ma quando vien lo sgelo
il primo sole è mio
il primo bacio dell’aprile è mio!
Germoglia in un vaso una rosa…
Foglia a foglia la spio!

….is the most blissful of all romantic lead-ins, and one of Giacosa’s most poetic stanzas.  Some of the best sopranos have always counted this among their most coveted passages of one of the greatest roles in all of opera.  No soprano of true worth did not deliver the goods with this role, those it’s a tricky proposition to assert which singers were most prominent in the role.

The shouts of Rodolfo’s friends from the courtyard below call him to the window; the moonlight flooding the room, shines directly on Mimi’s face and Rodolfo is overcome with emotion.  Both embrace and sing the opera’s most famous duet, the ecstatic “O soave fanciulla.”  The number combined the most rapturous sections of “Che Gelida Manina” and “Mi chiamano Mini” to create one of the score’s most ravishing passages, and a full declaration of the couple’s love for each other.  They then go off to join Rodolfo’s friends at the Cafe Momus.

The orchestral music that provides as a segue into the opera’s second act is properly celebratory and it underscores the bustling and brightly lit street in the Latin Quarter where Rodolfo and Mimi meet the other Bohemians outside the Cafe Momus.  The entrance of Marcello’s erstwhile mistress, Musetta, causes a sensation, as she is on the arm of a wealthy admirer, Alcindoro.  She situates at a neighboring table and attempts to attract Marcello’s attention by singing of the amorous allure her appearance inspires.  The waltz song “Quando me’n vo’ soletta per la vie” (When I walk alone in the street, people praise my beauty from head to toe.  You must still love me; why don’t you return?  Marcello, after some initial irritation, capitulates; Musetta creates a scene to get rid of Alcindoro, and throws herself into her former lover’s arms. Disaster strikes when the bill is presented, and it is unknown who will pick it up.  As a military band approaches, the Bohemians disappear into crowd.  Alcindoro re-enters to find Musetta absent and collapses in disbelief at the huge bill left for him.  This scene exudes an erotic decadence as Musetta’s profession is clear enough, and the implied promiscuity of the flirty waltz maneuvers is highly sexual in tone.  Many opera fans consider this the most captivating aria in the score, and it immediately won international solo licensing after the work debuted.

Act III opens outside a tavern on the fringes of Paris.  It is envisioned superlatively in the film version of the opera that is actually the subject of this essay, even if it has not yet been discussed.  It is bleak and snowy morning in February; street-sweepers and peasants pass by on their way to the city.  There is a clear sense of foreboding when Mini is unveiled here as weak and afflicted by a nagging cough.  She is looking for Marcello, who promptly walks out of the tavern.  She informs him of all her troubles, telling him how Rodolfo torments her with his constant jealousy.    When Rodolfo himself appears  Mini retreats in confusion, hoping to avert a confrontation.  Roldolfo tells Marcello a different story: his jealous fits hide despair over Mimi’s increasingly serious illness.  Mimi’s coughs and sobs announce her presence just as Marcello, hearing Musetta’s laugh, rushes back inside.  Rodolfo and Mini agree that they must part, but sing poignantly of their love in a sublime duet that further prove that melodic invention is evenly dispersed throughout the opera.  Marcello and Musetta exchange insults while Rodolfo and Mimi agree to stay together until the coming of spring, turning the end of the act into one of the most beloved quartets in all of opera.

The opera’s final act is staged again in the Bohemians’ garret.  It is clear enough that a few months have passed.  Rodolfo and Marcello are discussing Mimi and Musetta.  They feign indifference, but reveal their true feelings in a lovely and aching tenor-baritone duet “Ah, Mimi, tu piu non torni” as each mourns for his former sweetheart.  Colline and Schaunard arrive, and the four friends enact a series of charades culminating in a frantic mock duel.  Musetta’s sudden appearance shatters the mood with new that Mimi is extremely ill with consumption.  She is brought in, and her dire conditions spurs the Bohemians to scrape together money for a doctor.  Colline moves to pawn his old coat, and sings it an elegiac aria of farewell – “Vecchia zimarra.”  Alone at this point, Rodolfo and Mimi reminisce about their first meeting.  The others return, and Mimi slowly drifts into a coma.  As Rodolfo comforts her Schaunard discovers that her sleep will be permanent.  The opera ends on Rodolfo’s anguished cries.

The 1965 film version of La Boheme was directed by one of opera’s most celebrated icons, Franco Zeffirelli, whose painterly eye and aesthetic traditionalism is a perfect fit for a work that boasts some ravishing settings.  The director uses his camera to acentuate some rather vital plots points.  One, the key-dropping in the first act that occurs just before “Che Gelida Manina” is normally obscure in stage productions, but is rescued here by the ever-reliable zoom close-up.  During the delightful Cafe Momus segment the director swings back and forth in accord with the movement that could only be scene as part of the general picture on the stage.  Zeffirelli’s attention to physical movement superbly compliments the rousing on-rushing timber of the aria.   The director is generous with close-ups of his stars, the now-legendary Mirella Freni (Mimi), who at that time was rising to supreme prominence, and the underrated Gianni Raimondi (Rodolfo), whose robust, well-modulated voice gives more authenticity to the Bohemian he is playing.  Physically he is appropriately non-descript, perfect in a way that more high profile singers like Lucio Pavarotti were not.  Freni’s silvery voice (no other singer can match her “Mi Chiamano Mimi”) and telling facial expressions are the domain of the film director, and in this sense such captures trump anything that can be negotiated in an opera house.  Exceptional singing was rendered by Rolando Panerai as Marcello, Gianni Maffeo as Schaunard, and Ivo Vinco as Colline, while as Musetta, Adrianao Martino is wholly extraordinary in her big number.

The tempos are seemingly perfect, the renowned conductor Herbert von Karajan, the La Scala orchestra and the cast recorded the soundtrack at the Munich Opera, while Zeffirelli employed that exquisite eye for detail, set design and costume to craft the best-looking Boheme that film could possibly achieve.

No doubt luck and timing allowed for such a magnificent film version of an opera to become part of the permanent record.  Zeffirelli and a stellar cast, a first-rate conductor with one of the great opera orchestras under his baton, and a true feel for the bohemian life on the outskirts of Paris.

Franco Zeffirelli’s filmed opera of La Boheme is a masterpiece of a masterpiece.

by Shubhajit Lahiri

Woman of the Lake, directed by Yoshishige Yoshida, aka Kiju Yoshida, one of the most influential members and great intellectuals of the Japanese New Wave movement, was a lyrical, disquieting and beautifully shot meditation on urban alienation, existential crisis, marital fidelity, and the complex dynamics of love and lust. This was the 2^nd film in the director’s thematically & stylistically connected series of 6 films, made right after his parting ways with Shochiku Studio, which has been loosely qualified as “Anti-Melodramas”. All were shot in B/W (except for one), starred his glorious wife-cum-muse Okada, and fabulously deconstructed the melodrama form of filmmaking by imbuing them with a dark, edgy, layered, psychologically dense, thematically rich and stylistically dazzling signature.

It was preceded by A Story Written with Water(a troubling account of mother-son relationship with all its repressed desires and associated guilt), and was followed by The Affair/Joen(a bravura and powerful examination of a mother’s memory on her daughter and how it shapes her relationship with men – possibly the best film of the lot along with the one under focus), Flame & Women(an incisive probe into psychological questions and moral dilemmas through the topic of artificial insemination), Affair in the Snow (portrayal of the dichotomy and irony of choosing between sexual prowess and emotional connect, and a complementary and companion piece to Woman of the Lake) and Farewell to Summer Light (a lilting take on questions of memory and ephemerality of relationships that is sure to remind one of Linklater’s “Before Trilogy”, and the only one shot in colour).

Yoshida established the basic premise of the film, based on a novel by Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, within the first 15 minutes or so. Miyako (Mariko Okada), a 30-something strikingly beautiful married lady, is embroiled in a vacuous extra-marital affair with a young man. Even though she brushes off his advances for marriage – her husband is after all a rich man – she agrees to being photographed in the nude for him. Unfortunately, while on her way home in the night, her handbag, containing the damaging negatives, fall in the hands of a stranger. As expected, she is drawn into a game of blackmail when she’s instructed to board a train to another town to meet him; but, in a marvelous reversal to audience expectations, she’s drawn into a complex relationship with the man, which was reminiscent of Imamura’s fascinating Intentions of Murder (incidentally both had Shigeru Tsuyuguchi in similar roles).

Yoshida infused the leisurely paced narrative with themes of loneliness and sexual frustration (a recurring thread in his ‘Anti-Melodrama’ series – perhaps on account of his relationship with one of the most alluring and popular Japanese actresses of his time), and complemented them with melancholic tone, haunting imageries and long moments of silence. The expressionistic yet subdued (as opposed to high contrast) B/W photography, with its share of silhouettes and chiaroscuro, was the most striking aspects of this brilliant film with a superb central performance by Okada. In a gleefully self-reflexive touch and as a post-script to this write-up, there was a B-film shoot sequence where the body double of the heroine is brazenly exploited by its makers, which aptly highlighted and counterpointed the film’s premise.

This was, for all practical purposes, a romantic melodrama, but one that was diametrically opposite to the conventional kind in keeping with Yoshida’s style, in particular, and the radical, deconstructive and audacious tonal, thematic and stylistic experiments that had formed the cornerstone of Japanese New Wave filmmakers like Imamura, Teshigahara, Oshima, Shindo, Kurahara, Shinoda et al.

by John Grant

US / 90 minutes / bw / MGM

Dir: Vincente Minnelli (reportedly helped by Fred Zinnemann)

Pr: Arthur Freed

Scr: Robert Nathan, Joseph Schrank

Story: Paul Gallico, Pauline Gallico

Cine: George Folsey

Cast: Judy Garland, Robert Walker, James Gleason, Keenan Wynn, Marshall Thompson, Lucile Gleason, Ruth Brady, Chester Clute.

Corporal Joe Allen (Walker), an Indiana boy home from the war on furlough with no knowledge of where next in the combat zone he’ll be posted, finds himself in New York’s Grand Central Station with no real clue as to what to do with himself. Just then, pretty office worker Alice Maybery (Garland) trips over his foot, breaking the heel on her shoe. The chance encounter leads them to a trip around the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in due course out on a date—she standing up her regular squeeze Freddy, her romance with whom, we soon understand, is the creation of her roomie Helen (Brady), who would like her to be less giddy-headed and start going steady.

Soon they’re convinced there’s a romantic inevitability in their having tripped over each other:

            Alice: Suppose we hadn’t met?

            Joe: We couldn’t not have met.

On the way home after midnight from Central Park they’re picked up by milk-cart driver Al Henry (James Gleason); most “comic relief” characters of the period seem woeful to us now, but Gleason’s has weathered well. When he gets socked by a drunk (Wynn, in a bravura performance), the young couple decide to deliver his milk for him.

            Joe: I don’t know, though, I don’t think it’s fair to the girl, a soldier getting married. He doesn’t know what condition he’s going to come back in . . . he may not even come back at all.

From there on it seems they’re fated to be married. But, thanks to a succession of moronic bureaucracies, this takes far longer than they’d like; only after they’ve jumped through a gazillion hoops to qualify for a civil marriage do they discover this isn’t enough (one of the dehumanizing requirements is that they have to acquire blood-test certificates). In a very effective final sequence they sit in St Patrick’s Cathedral and recite a version of the marriage ceremony to each other. After that they are, in their own terms, married; today, of course, they’d not wait for the clerical okay. Only when they’ve conducted their own form of the Catholic wedding ceremony in a cathedral do they feel finally able to consummate the relationship.

There’s so much to like about this movie, not least that the romantic pair aren’t what they should be. He’s exactly the opposite of the studly seducer—he’s the Joe Schmoe with a good sense of humor . . . which is likely why she responds to him so much. He’s a Mork to her Mindy, his Indiana naivety contrasting with her Manhattan worldly-wisdom . . . except that she discovers she prefers his naivety to her—and more especially Helen’s—sophistication.

            The Clock does, in its later stages, start to get a little long, but before that it’s a paradigm of what romantic movies should be. Here’s Alice on the limitations of her civil marriage with Joe: “It was so, so . . . ugly.” Yet her final “church wedding” is little better.

By Pat Perry

Diane: “Nobody thinks it will work, do they?”
Lloyd: “No. You just described every great success story.”

- final lines of Say Anything

 

By Tony d’Ambra

The fog of angst seeps from the faces of two doomed lovers in the dank gloom of Le Havre. Jean is on the run and Nelly is trapped in a psychic prison as real as the physical constraints on her existence. Happiness is something that may exist but neither knows it.

They meet by chance one night in a broken-down bar on the waterfront amongst the detritus of an ephemeral humanity. Panama’s is a haven for the down-and-out named for the hat of the publican, an old shaman with a rusted soul as deep as the canal he visited in his youth. Father confessor of an unholy convent for lost souls. He keeps his counsel, asks no questions, and strums his guitar.

And everywhere the fog and the harbor with rusting hulks at anchor ever-waiting transport for deliverance. The two lovers stroll as tentative friends with a hope as forlorn as it is sublime, when a bright clarity intrudes, a hoodlum with a malice as sharp as his clothes and his shave, and as evil as his cowardice.

A night of bliss follows. Jean and Nelly find love at a sea-side carnival and that elusive union we all seek – in a rented room. They keep missing pernicious Fate a drunken vagabond. The glory of a new dawn is soon shattered. They each leave alone. Fate occupies the sheets of last night’s passion, and they are lost.

Screen grab from Richard Lester’s classic Beatles film “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964)

by Sam Juliano

A few glorious days have followed the remnants of a storm that went out to sea on the cusp of the July 4th weekend that saved the holiday for many, and allowed barbecues to operate successfully until the fireworks upstaged all.  Independence Day was a fine day for many, and it’s conclusion marks the start of the dog days of summer.

I want to thank Dee Dee from the bottom of my heart for her remarkable sidebar updating and the usual holiday markings.  This site remains in her debt for years.

The romantic countdown continues with several more superlative entries this past week.  Both the page view and comment totals remain constant in a very good way, as we get closer and closer to the mid-way point.

The tragic passing of a 57 year-old longtime friend of a 12 year illness kept everything in a state of melancholy most of the week.  John Mesisca was a trustee on the Fairview Board of Education for multiple terms.

Lucille and I had hoped to see the new Roger Ebert documentary, but as stated above this was a very difficult weekend.  We managed to see two films in total, one a recent release, the other a classic revival.

Snowpiercer   ****    (Saturday night)    Angelika Film Center

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)  *****  (Sunday morning)  Film Forum

SNOWPIERCER is for the most part a wildly creative and violent  futuristic yarn set on a train -some have compared it to Transformers- with a dazzling set design and some very fine performances.  Take a little while to get going, but when it does it rocks.

Richard Lester’s stylish A HARD DAY’S NIGHT is one of the greatest of all music films, and it’s the most beloved film from the greatest band of all-time.  The two week Film Forum run coincides with the Criterion blu-rays availability at 50% off during July Barnes & Noble sale.

Screen grab from “Snowpiercer.”

By J.D. Lafrance

      It took a Canadian filmmaker to make Moonstruck (1987), the quintessential Italian-American romantic comedy from a screenplay written by an Irish-American playwright, but then isn’t that what the American experience is all about? For what is the United States, but the great melting pot? Norman Jewison’s film is a celebration of love, life and food. John Patrick Shanley’s script is full of romantic yearnings for, among many things, the opera and, of course, the moon. Above all else, the film places an emphasis on the importance of family. Moonstruck was the My Big Fat Geek Wedding (2002) of its day only infinitely better and about an Italian family as opposed to a Greek one. Watching Jewison’s film again, you realize just how much Nia Vardalos’ romantic comedy is heavily indebted to it. If Moonstruck is La Boheme than Greek Wedding isTony and Tina’s Wedding.

Loretta Castorini (Cher) is engaged to Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello). They act like an old married couple and they haven’t even tied the knot yet! And therein lies the problem – their relationship lacks passion. He is called away suddenly to Italy to see his mother on her deathbed and asks Loretta to invite his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) to their wedding. Ronny works in a bakery and is bitter over having lost his hand in a freak accident, blaming Johnny for what happened. In a classic case of opposites attracting, Loretta and Ronny find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other.

At the time, Nicolas Cage was considered an odd casting choice because of his reputation as an eccentric character actor. The way he gestures and enunciates certain words is off-kilter in such a way that it gives his scenes a wonderfully unpredictable vibe. He makes unusual choices and surprisingly they all work. Cage delivers a very physical, Brando-esque performance only filtered through his very distinctive style of acting as evident in the scene where Ronny and Loretta meet for the first time. Cage is fascinating to watch for the unusual choices he makes. Ronny paces around the room, starting his rant quietly before gradually building in intensity, punctuating his impassioned speech with words like, “huh” and “sweetie.” Jewison orchestrates the actor beautifully through editing so that the scene has an absolutely captivating rhythm as we gain insight into Ronny’s character. Cage conveys an impressive range of emotions as Ronny goes from pride to rage to sadness.

He plays well off of Cher and they have the kind of chemistry that is so important for this kind of film. His fiery, Method approach works well in contrast to Cher’s more controlled style and their scenes together crackle with the intensity of two actors with very different approaches bouncing off each other. Ronny is a wounded animal, “a wolf without a foot,” as Loretta puts it, and she is “a bride without a head,” as he tells her, but over the course of the film she transforms him into a civilized human being. She brings out the romantic who likes to dress up and go to the opera. Cher does a wonderful job of immersing herself in the character of Loretta, a strong-willed, smart woman who thinks she has it all figured out until she meets Ronny. On the surface, Loretta may seem like a cynic, but she has taken what she feels is a more realistic approach towards love because of the death of her previous husband. She has chosen to marry Johnny not because she loves him, but because he’s a safe bet. Her heart has fallen asleep only to be awakened by Ronny. Cher won a well-deserved Academy Award for her performance as a widow who, against her better judgement, falls in love again. Watching her in this film reminds one how natural an actress she is and what a crime it is that she doesn’t act more often.

Cage and Cher are well supported by a fantastic cast of colorful character actors. Vincent Gardenia plays Loretta’s cheap father Cosmo who has a lover on the side and Olympia Dukakis is Rose, her wise mother full of world-weary pearls of wisdom, like when she tells her daughter about men: “When you love them they drive you crazy because they know they can.” There’s an air of sadness to her character as Rose seems to have resigned herself to a life where every day is the same. Then there’s Feodor Chaliapin, Jr. as Loretta’s grandfather who can be seen in several scenes walking his small fleet of mangy dogs and seems to be used as merely window-dressing until Jewison gives him a pivotal moment towards the end of the film.

The film’s secret weapon is Danny Aiello as mama’s boy Johnny. From hysterical crying to the way he interacts with Cher’s Loretta, his portrayal of Johnny is a master class in comedic acting. Johnny thinks he knows something about men and women (“A man who can’t control his woman is funny.”), but is quickly put in his place by Loretta. Aiello does wonders with throwaway bits of dialogue like, “My scalp is not getting enough blood sometimes,” as Johnny tells Loretta over dinner while vigorously rubbing his hair. He doesn’t mug per se, but rather plays it straight in a way that makes his character look ridiculous via tiny gestures or through a specific facial expression. Compared to someone like Cage, you know Aiello has no chance with Cher, but the actor plays it like Johnny believes they are going to get married all the way through the film.

There are superb recurring gags, like John Mahoney’s sad university professor who keeps striking out with younger women that throw wine in his face midway through dinner before storming out of the restaurant. While his character is a bit of a Lech, Mahoney’s expressive eyes convey a sadness that makes you feel somewhat sympathetic for him. There’s a nice scene between his character and Rose where they end up having dinner together at the restaurant after he’s publicly embarrassed yet again by his latest young lady friend (Canadian actress Cynthia Dale in a small role). It’s a lovely scene between two lonely people as they talk honestly about their lives and she asks him, “Why do men chase women?” He has no good answer and she tells him, “I think it’s because they fear death.” It kickstarts a fascinating conversation that allows us to understand these two people. Every time I watch Moonstruck I imagine an offshoot film that follows Rose and the professor as they run off together or perhaps have a brief affair.

The use of location is excellent. For example, the opening shot is of Lincoln Center (which features prominently later on) in New York City so we know exactly where we are. Most of the film is set in Brooklyn and Jewison conveys an almost tactile feel for the borough. You want to be there and know these people. You also get a real sense of community. The warm, inviting lighting of the Italian restaurant where Johnny proposes to Loretta and where her mother has dinner with Mahoney’s professor has a wonderful, intimate atmosphere made up of warm reds and contrasting greens that puts you right there. There is another scene where Loretta looks out the window at the full moon in the night sky and the lighting is perfect with just the right music that results in such a touching, poignant moment. No words are spoken because none are needed with such visuals.

As much as the 1980s was typified by Wall Street’s (1987) Gordon Gekko and his “Greed is good” mantra,Moonstruck is about blue-collar people. It pays tribute to folks that represent the glue of society, showing us bookkeepers, bread makers, liquor store owners, plumbers and so on plying their trade. The characters in this film may lead workaday jobs, but their personal lives are anything but average. Like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Moonstruck does heighten ethnic stereotypes for comedic effect, but the latter film does so sincerely and with class. Moonstruck perpetuates a lot of Italian stereotypes, but not in a grating way, playfully making fun of some of them while celebrating others with affection. Far from being a bundle of ethnic clichés, it is a celebration of the Italian-American experience. The crucial difference between the two films is tone. Where Greek Wedding is all cuddly, feel good sitcom, Moonstruck has some bite to it, an edge as represented by Cage’s passionate performance. This film is full of fantastic acting and much pleasure comes from watching a very talented cast speak brilliantly written dialogue. Best of all it has a wonderful sense of romantic naivete, a cinematic love letter to New York City.

1 Attached Images

by John Grant

vt Build My Gallows High

US / 97 minutes / bw / RKO Dir: Jacques Tourneur Pr: Warren Duff Scr: Geoffrey Homes Story: Build My Gallows High (1946) by Geoffrey Homes Cine: Nicholas Musuraca Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Richard Webb, Steve Brodie, Virginia Huston, Paul Valentine, Dickie Moore, Ken Niles, Theresa Harris, Wallace Scott, John Kellogg.

Film noir is not generally a genre much associated with romance, so it’s perhaps a surprise to find prominent noirs listed in this countdown, and perhaps most surprising of all that this, one of the half-dozen or so films noirs that could be regarded as defining the genre, is one of them. Other noirs deal exquisitely with the obsessive face of love—The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and Double Indemnity (1944) spring instantly to mind (and is obsession truly romance?)—but Out of the Past manages to tell a tale of obsession that more than matches those while doing so in the context of, and within the narrative framework of, a genuinely romantic love story.

The tale of obsession first:

A couple of years ago PI Jeff Markham (Mitchum) was hired by hoodlum Whit Sterling (Douglas) to track down the mistress who’d put four bullets into him and run off with $40,000 of his money, Kathie Moffatt (Greer). With the help of her maid, Eunice Leonard (Harris), Jeff tracked her down to Acapulco, where he became instantly infatuated with her. When Whit and his goon Joe Stefanos (Valentine) followed Jeff to Mexico, Jeff claimed that Kathie had left for some destination unknown in South America. In fact, Jeff and Kathie then snuck away to San Francisco, where they lived together incognito for a while before Jeff’s old PI partner, Jack Fisher (Brodie), spotted them quite by chance at a racetrack. Fisher followed them home and there was a confrontation, during which Kathie shot the interloper dead, thereafter fleeing into the night . . .

So much we’re told in flashback as Jeff explains his past to Ann Miller (Huston), the nice young woman with whom he’s very deeply in love; they hope her parents will come round to the idea of their getting married. Since the events of the flashback Jeff has been operating under the nom de guerre Jeff Bailey, running a small-town gas station with the assistance of a deaf-and-dumb youth universally called The Kid (Moore). But now Joe Stefanos has appeared out of nowhere to tell Jeff that Whit wants to hire him for that noirish archetype: Just One Last Job. Jeff doesn’t feel he’s in any position to refuse, but he promises Ann he’ll be back as soon as he’s managed to disentangle himself.

What he doesn’t expect is to find that Kathie is once again Whit’s mistress, and that now his obsession for her has almost entirely evaporated: he can see her as the poisonous viper she is. The casting of Greer in this part is a triumph. As events proceed and the sociopathic Kathie’s actions become viler and viler, as it’s clear that she’s entirely amoral in every sense, she manages to stay looking more like a virgin than a virgin does. She has the fresh-faced prettiness of Hollywood’s ideal nun, and only occasionally—in the shifting of an eye or the curving of a lip—does her true corruption show through this apparently guileless mask.

The job Whit has in mind involves accountant Leonard Eels (Niles), whom Whit claims is blackmailing him over his unpaid taxes. As it’s explained to Jeff, the idea is that, with the help of Eels’s treacherous secretary Meta Carson (Fleming), he should steal the relevant documentation; in reality, however, the plan is for Stefanos to murder Eels after Meta has engineered matters such that Jeff’s fingerprints are all over Eels’s apartment—i.e., that Jeff’s to be set up as the patsy. Luckily for Jeff he cottons on fast—not fast enough to stop the murder, but fast enough to screw up the schemes of the bad guys.

Again there’s a casting triumph. Fleming was one of the great Hollywood femmes fatales, so was a natural for the part of the faithless employee, the secretary who’s taking advantage of the boss’s unspoken love for her—near worship, in fact—not merely to sell him out but to connive in his destruction. Yet there’s also a certain physical echo of Greer in her appearance and, by design (we assume), in her onscreen affect; indeed, soon afterwards, when Jeff spies on Kathie making a phonecall that she thinks will spring the next part of the scheme to frame him into effect, it takes us a moment or two to realize that it’s Kathie, not Meta, whom he’s spying upon. As it were, then, Meta is Kathie with the mask removed: one glance and you can tell she’s a mercenary femme fatale, whereas with the far more dangerous Kathie it takes longer.

Kathie continues to play not just both ends but every conceivable end against the middle. Her latest seduced chump is clearly Joe Stefanos, with whom she’s seemingly plotting to cheat Whit, betray Jeff, and skedaddle with the loot. Cleverly, she works out that the way to track Jeff down is for Stefanos to follow The Kid; stupidly, neither of them realize that The Kid’s muteness has nothing to do with lack of intelligence—and indeed, as Stefanos prepares to murder Jeff, The Kid very craftily dispatches him.

Having herself murdered Whit, Kathie reckons that her best bet for the next stage of her campaign of terrorism against the world is to hook up yet again with Jeff, whom she assumes she can still enslave with the merest amorous glance. She’s also incapable of comprehending that he’s not in fact like her: “You’re no good for anyone but me. You’re no good and neither am I. That’s why we deserve each other.” But, far from being no good, Jeff is a man of integrity and honor, all the more so because of his love for Ann.

Yet one more thing Kathie doesn’t realize is that Jeff has finally concluded that the only way of expunging her poison is for her to die, and that his love for Ann is great enough that he’s willing to sacrifice his own life if need be to help bring this about. And in the very closing moments of the movie we come across yet another sign of how much Jeff adored Ann. While Jeff was still alive, Ann was fending off the attentions of local stalwart Jim (Webb); now that Jeff’s dead she tries to settle her mind by asking The Kid if he knows whether, in his final moments, Jeff was planning to run away with Kathie. The Kid lies that, yes, this was what Jeff was doing; while there have been various interpretations placed on this closing exchange, the one that seems most attractive is that Jeff briefed The Kid to act this way should anything happen to him, so that Ann could get on with her life.

That Out of the Past should be such an exemplary piece of moviemaking (aside from the odd continuity error that people who have always known Jeff as Markham call him Bailey in the second half of the movie) may seem paradoxical. The screenplay is credited to Geoffrey Homes, a usual nom de plume of the writer Daniel Mainwaring (he used it on the novel too), and it’s been generally accepted that there were some uncredited dialogue contributions from James M. Cain. According to Roger Ebert, however, Homes’s screen play was lousy, Cain didn’t so much do some polishing as produce a complete rewrite, which was also lousy, so that the final screenplay was done by resident house writer Frank Fenton. Whatever the truth, the result’s little short of a masterpiece. It has perfect pacing. There’s superb characterization of not only the principals—Mitchum often had to make the most of poorly imagined roles, but here he has one of sufficient complexity and empathy for him really to get his teeth into—but also in minor parts like Petey (Scott), a cabby who’s an old pal and accomplice of Jeff’s, and most especially in The Kid, where Moore gives us a brilliant performance. And there’s a plethora of stunning one-liners:

• “You say to yourself, ‘How hot can it get?’ Then, in Acapulco, you find out.”
• “They say, the day you die, your name is written in the clouds.”
• “All women are wonders, because they reduce all men to the obvious.” “So do martinis.”
• “Build my gallows high, baby.”

That last gave its title to Homes’s novel, and also the title of the movie’s first UK release. It’s extremely rare for a movie’s main title and variant title to be each as good as the other in their encapsulation of the movie’s ethos. It’s Jeff’s past actions, as much as Kathie’s fevered, incurable conspirings, that have built those gallows. He has tried to escape his past, but there’s no escape: in typical noir fashion, fate insists there can be no redemption.

Musuraca’s cinematography is as usual impeccable without always being ostentatious. The item that most people recall is Jeff’s first sight of Kathie, but for me the sweetest part comes a few minutes later as Jeff waits for her in a different bar: there’s a short pan around the bar, symbolizing the passage of a day’s tedious expectancy, and then there she suddenly, almost unexpectedly is. A similar observation can be made about Roy Webb’s soundtrack and Jacques Tourneur’s direction: both are superb but both, rather than pushing themselves in your face, serve the movie so well that it’s only afterwards you realize quite how good they were.

Because that’s what characterizes Out of the Past, what makes it such an extraordinary offering: the way that everything is so well integrated, like a painting that perfectly satisfies the eye even though it’s hard to isolate which aspect is the one that appeals so much, the one that takes the painting from exquisite to masterpiece. Every time I watch Out of the Past I find it’s an even better movie than the one I recalled, and every time I realize that the real love story it tells us is not the one we always remember, about the passion-fueled infatuation that Jeff has for Kathie, and her exploitation of his blind obsession, but the tale of the deeply powerful love Jeff has for Ann—the love that sees him gladly give up his life to protect her.

The movie was loosely remade as Against All Odds (1984) dir Taylor Hackford, with Jeff Bridges, Rachel Ward, James Woods, Richard Widmark, Alex Karras, Swoosie Kurtz and Dorian Harewood; Jane Greer has a small role as a corrupt businesswoman and mother of femme fatale Jessie (the equivalent of the earlier movie’s Kathie, so Greer is playing her own mother, as it were). The remake tends to suffer by comparison with the original, and plenty of folk have had fun savaging it, but in reality, looked at in isolation, it’s a perfectly respectable piece of work.

            Out of the Past was added to the National Film Registry in 1991—ironic in that, on release, it wasn’t so much as nominated for a single award

© 2014 by James Clark

      I don’t usually refer to other critics in pursuing these film entries; but here it seems to make a lot of sense. The esteemed film observer, Jonathan Rosenbaum, produced (in 1982) a review of Amarcord (1973) that was both typically cogent and typically half-hearted. Seeing clearly that Fellini’s outreach about an Adriatic town in the 1930s comprises “community rituals and seasonal changes,” he describes the longings of many of its residents, for something more than that often charming inertia, as “dreams and other fantasies,” which is to say, a type of reflexive inertia veering away from reality. Smoothly disarming any traces of abrasiveness in this finding to be quite futile any challenge to mechanics and orthodoxy, the appreciation identifies the auteur’s evolution as an increased trusting of “imagination over ‘realistic’ observation.” “Fact and fancy are never far apart” in Fellini’s work. But that proposition does nothing to sustain that what he calls “fancy”—in its sense of the “more” that is remarkably new to history—could be a mature, serious form of consciousness. Rosenbaum concedes that “… it is precisely the domain of privacy that the town’s collective dream life feeds upon…” But I can’t help reading between the lines here that “the town’s collective dream life” amounts to some kind of sad little joke. He declares, “…the film charts the lot of provincial dwellers everywhere;” and with that the unwelcome whiff of sociology begins to fill the air.

For all his rhetorical gracefulness, what Rosenbaum seems intent to play hard ball with is the question of fantasy ever being recognized as a phenomenon, with not only as much purchase upon concrete power as conventional culture and experience—but more. Unattended to, in Rosenbaum’s brief skim to establish Amarcord’s poignancy, is the recurrent image of a motorcyclist suddenly roaring through the streets and quickly disappearing who knows where. Near the end, he terrifies and infuriates one of our protagonists, Titta, as the latter tries (in vain) to catch up with another protagonist whom he is very fond of, namely, Gradisca, after a record snowfall which leaves the town square resembling the trenches of World War I. From that perspective, and from the copious actions of conflict and coercion that fill the screen, we might regard the vaguely military form on two wheels as a ghostly messenger rushing urgent information amidst points of a battleground that extends far beyond the quirky little outpost. The battle would be precisely about those, like Rosenbaum, who like things the way they have always been and pretend to know that there is no way of countering them; and those, like Fellini, and his protagonists, who endow Amarcord with phenomenal weight, wit and passion. It has been necessary to orient in this way, because instances of influential figures like Rosenbaum actively vitiate the reflective phenomena so carefully primed by daring filmmakers, amongst whom Fellini is extremely important. Amarcord’s depths, subtleties and beauties need to be approached as closely as possible in the spirit in which they were designed and produced, in order that the phenomenal range comprising film and audience elicit that intensive magic, unique to film art.

Rather than netting those sensually striking women, so apparent in Amarcord, in a presupposed web of rather farcical illusion, we would be much better off opening our eyes to what they actually show us on the screen. Gradisca (resembling Juliet of the Spirit’s Suzy—perky, bright-eyed and alluring—but pared down, due to having to hold down a job as a hairdresser) comes along with her sister and another friend, to an event in the town square whereby a towering bonfire signals the end of dead winter and the beginning of lively spring. She, by a kind of aristocracy of physical harmony and playful warmth, is called upon to light the heap of branches and no longer wanted wooden furniture, after which she enthuses, “I feel it [spring] all over me already!” (which is to say, she is swept up in an unusual surge of dynamic creativity). Outstripping her and the other women featured in this film in their capacity as Sirens, we have disinterested moments from them, like that which we’ve just noted (and like those of the motorcyclist and his Futurist infatuation with dangerous speed) which have to be factored into this film’s easily confusing scramble of self-assertion apparently devoid of mystery. Gradisca’s second walk on a wild side you have to keep your eyes open to see comes to us encumbered by the adolescent, Titta, determining not to include an episode with her in his confessional contretemps with a priest more intent on decorating a chapel than serving one of his flock. Titta catches up with her in the darkened profane chapel of a deserted movie house on a weekday afternoon. She is enraptured by Gary Cooper on the screen, in the Foreign Legion tale, Morocco, concerning Marlene Dietrich throwing away a life of comfort and prestige for anonymity and primordial love on burning desert sands. Her attitude in being thus overcome (as with the bonfire) includes regal occupancy of the murky, dramatically highlighted movie palace, emotively comparable to the stance of Cocteau’s Belle making a suspenseful beachhead in Bête’s dark, vast and empty dining room. Whereas Titta shifts from seat to seat to finally sit next to her and put his hand on her thigh, we have the precedent to such a tete-a-tete, involving an ardent but regal suitor/Bête, holding at bay the sway toward farce. The smoke from Gradisca’s cigarette spans both a palace where tapers (ending in live hands and arms) inform optics of satin (and filmy white curtains billow in the breeze) and a dream factory out of which she has to ask the rude, even beastly, boy, “Looking for something?” Well, Belle and Bête were all about looking for something from each other, something which will endow them with better preparedness for a sphere of breathtaking riches and difficulty. Prior to his reverie about Gradisca, Titta silently vowed (at the confessional) not to divulge a hard to dignify moment with one of the other women we need to take seriously despite the strong temptation to see them as incapable of seriousness. Billed by one and all as “the town nymphomaniac,” Volpina is more than that. But how hard is it to stay that course with Titta referring to “the day I pumped up her [bicycle] tires”? Fellini and screenwriting assistant, Tonino Guerra, are masters of ribaldry; but it is for us to understand that they are far more than facile gag writers. (As with Fellini’s Roma, written and produced the year before, Fellini has piled on a staggering flood of often grating miscues, in order to capture the extent of the oblivion at issue; and to go on to pose a test as to identifying vital signs.) Back on the hunt for the soul of Gradisca’s extremis, there is a Fascist rally with Mussolini himself as very special guest. She yells, most excitedly and happily, “There he is!” That visiting trace of world history gives the folks a pack of antiquated hot air (a big balloon version of his face having been brought in by the design geniuses at Party headquarters). “… The salute of ancient Rome that shows us the path of destiny that Fascist Italy must follow…” “Oh, let me touch him, I want to touch him!” she screams, inadvertently putting herself in the same boat as Titta stalking her in the movie palace being weighed upon by Bête’s palace. To twist the knife a little bit more, we have Il Duce, jogging along with one of those run-along military bands which amused us in Fellini’s early film, The White Sheik (1952), about a naive but ardent bride who throws herself at a fat, show-biz type. “Long live, Il Duce,” she shouts, showing the Fascist salute. But her chic little purse is in that raised right hand, and we should be able to see that she has a hard-to-touch Leader substantially (if not definitively) eclipsing the short-lived sensation. (She’s headed for a wedding with an officer of Mussolini’s ill-fated project. At the reception she cries a lot.) The whole town forms a flotilla one night, to see close up the regime’s chic ocean liner, “The Rex,” passing the seaport four miles offshore. As the celebration forms up, a village idiot remarks, “Where are they going with hearts pounding?” It’s quite impossible not to recall the old lady (a sort of Chorus) in Tati’s Jour de Fete, joining in, as best she can, on the rapturous edge of the excitement befalling a thrill-deprived centre. (Rosenbaum notes that both Fellini and Tati would depict town squares. But there’s a hell of a lot more than that to their affinities. To get there you have to care about the stakes and mistakes of body language.) On the ride out to the Rex (“It’s coming all the way from America”—America, where, in Jour de Fete, all the new things come from), the sunset providing a frisson, Gradisca tells a friend, “I was full of hope every time, but it never came to anything… I haven’t given up hope. I want one of those encounters that last a lifetime…” Finally sighting the floating palace, swirling up within a heavy mist (a sort of Bête’s palace, in accordance with the understanding, “… the greatest thing the regime ever built”)—the whole town having been, naturally, asleep and only wakened by a restless child, endowing the vision as a dream, quite out of this (mainstream) world—Gradisca cries, swamped by that elicitation of so much more than her life has been mired in. She goes on—in accordance with a bit of grasping for comfort in addition to high impact (“I want a family, children…a husband to chat with in the evening over coffee…”)—to marry a stolid Fascist Army officer, quite a contrast to Foreign Legionnaire, Gary Cooper; and their outdoor wedding reception (at Il Paradiso) strongly resembles the wedding gig of Gelsomina and Zampano, in La Strada.

Sexpot Volpina and the nameless tobacconist with enormous breasts, would, in accordance with the significant energies of Gradisca, be more aptly considered in terms of larger than (average) life than ignition of those settling for low-wattage buzz. Getting past the former’s clownishness—for instance, peeing on the beach in view of a construction crew (then coming over and telling them, “I lost my pussycat”)—it is her perhaps apocryphal crack-junky visage (a waxy sheen to her skin and remarkably kinetic eyes) that crowds out her goofiness and coheres with a haunting last glimpse of her in the hospital bed next to Titta’s dying mother. Getting past the startling proportions of her sexual properties, it is the isolation of the tobacco store proprietor which really matters. (Moments before, at an all-night car rally through the streets, Titta’s parasitical uncle rushes to examine a stray dog hit by a speed demon, finding that there is one of its ears on the road. Titta, on the other hand, had imagined being a Grand Prix hero. There are disconcerting affinities between those two; and as the latter [with his blonde hair and lips seemingly enhanced] makes his way through empty streets to the retail precincts of a Beast, after the race’s end, we have to not only weigh the woman’s energies [she being perhaps the only person in town not engaged by the public entertainment]; but also his capacity to break away from a family trait of perpetual adolescence. The parasite is Titta’s mother’s brother. We behold, also, a retarded, institutionalized brother of his father, on an outing, lobbing stones at all and sundry, from the vantage point of a tall tree, howling all the while, “I want a woman!”) The woman Titta wants tells him the store is closed but she lets him in, he claiming to be after a cigarette. He also claims that he could lift her off her feet, and she becomes intrigued that such a delicate little beauty (or, with that blonde hair, rosy cheeks and lipstick, the la of la Bête) has come into her orbit, a solitary orbit of consciousness the delicateness of which lies hidden within a no-nonsense facade (not, however, so no-nonsense as not to include, prominently displayed on her wall, a poster of a Surrealist painting, with a man whose brains are exposed due to the top of his skull being removed, and with a de Chirico-like chimney in the background, adding to the challenge toward brainwork). He lifts her twice. Both are aroused, eyes ablaze. The woman being cradled looks skyward as though beginning to have an orgasm that promises to reach epiphantic proportions. “See how my strength did it?” he declares. “Yes, my little darling!” From her sweater she pulls out a breast and tells him, “You really are sweet… Drive me crazy… Just a little…” [that last phrase revealing much about her]. “What should I do?” the boy asks desperately. “Suck!” she commands; and her delighting face is right beside that graphic image of downplaying rationality. “You can have this one, too,” she’s happy to say. But Titta’s limitations—“Don’t blow! Suck!”—break the spell and her rare ecstasy disappears. “I have to close up… [And, handing him a cigarette] It’s on me… Now, scram!” (The coda to this skirmish finds Titta sick in bed. He blames the downturn on the shop’s having disease-carrying flies; we can see that it’s about his not being up to the job.)

Amarcord was produced only one year after Fellini’s Roma. Whereas the latter evinces devastation that the law is an ass, lighting little incense sticks quietly bringing to bear mercies of grace in Surrealist films and the miracle that was Anna Magnani, Amarcord, every bit a cognizant that the school system, the Church, the government and the population at large have not done themselves proud, pulls out of its battered hat a weird and wonderful victory lap, of sorts, in taking the measure of individuals with workable (which is not to say, effectively functional) affection. In the course of delineating the clash between old and new (Volpina screams out, “Fu Manchu!” giving us to understand that she [far more incisively than Titta] feels herself to have been poisoned by agents of corruption), our film , as we have seen, envisions a form, however nebulous, of that always-welcome Beauty and Beast constellation. The obvious torch-bearers to that effect are Gradisca and Titta. During that kooky Confession, Titta muses, “I’m crazy about Gradisca! I want a wife just like her!” During the monumental snowfall, he tries to defend her against his randy school chums pelting her with snowballs. He gets one of her friendly fire missiles in the face; and then she runs away, saying, “Enough! I give up!” But, before she disappears, there is an apparition—“Look, it’s the Count’s peacock!” The wonderful, tropical fan tail spreads amidst the falling snow. Gradisca regards it with awe. Soon she’s tossing her bridal bouquet into an overcast void, seeing it plop onto a brown, grotty field. (At the ragged outdoor reception area, the tobacconist—so edgy in close-up with her nocturnal admirer—looks merely fat, rather old and even ill at ease in a shy way.) Titta is on the dock, packed to leave town. Then he shows up at the wedding reception, seen in a distant shot, aimlessly milling about with those chums having got up a little drag number for the celebrants—a number, part Gelsomina, part Mamma Roma. Not much of a sharing of wisdom and carnal energy; or so it seems.

But Fellini’s is a surreal, not a “let’s see the money” world. And though Gradisca (like Cocteau’s Belle, at the end of his film, oppressed by lousy choices and yet still able to put on a brave face) does not seem to have a future to calm her anxiety (“I’m so full of affection… but who can I give it to? Who will take it?”), the mere envisioning of threading such a needle goes a long way in this moment when a peacock dazzles in a snowstorm.

There is another Belle and another Bête here; and they are just as surprising as the weather, and just as brilliant as the peacock. At first, or even fifth, glance, Titta’s parents don’t seem to rise to the possibility of changing the world. Our first impressions of this pair all point to unremarkable self-serving assertion, resentment and conventionality. At the bonfire to celebrate powers of fruition, the dad, Aurelio, declares, “One father can look after a hundred kids; but a hundred kids can’t look after one father.” Not only resentful and self-pitying, his aphorism is of real interest in its challenge to populism, an odd state of affairs for the town’s premier Communist, who, during the day devoted to Mussolini, had “the Internationale” sent over the square, by recording. Tracking him down, the local masters pump him full of castor oil, and he cuts a poor (even beastly) figure staggering home covered with shit and greeted by his anxious wife, Miranda at their gate. “You won’t listen to me,” the eager-to-illuminate woman sadly maintains. So here they are, in the middle of the night, she carefully soaping him down, and Titta, seemingly always the jerk, laughingly noting, God, he stinks!” (The work-averse brother of this Belle had informed the authorities that Aurelio had committed that act of defiance, further showing himself—and, by implication, Titta—to be irrevocably hopeless.) Miranda had locked him into their compound, during the afternoon right-wing rally, to offset just such violence—all the while Aurelio raving, “Think I’m scared?” The captain in charge of his punishment had called him an “animal;” but, lion-hearted or not, his optical component lacks Cocteau’s Bête’s magnificent, poetic mane: he’s bald, with some kind of wart making him cringe-worthy; and his little mane at each side is far more amusing than charming. Certainly, you could not say he reigns over his dining room domain like a man intent on making salient life’s great poetry. The dinner we do observe could hardly show more cluttered domesticity. He chases Titta out of the house, having learned that the impudent boy had, the night before, peed on a man’s hat from the balcony of the movie theatre, featuring warring cowboys and Indians. Aurelio’s father, part of the extended family inured to conflict, can’t stop molesting the maid, who tells him, “You think my fanny’s a good luck charm?” Aurelio openly despises his brother-in-law, in a hair-net and bathrobe, who only stirs to seduce women with his nice looks and ballroom skills, who ridicules the Futurist speedster and takes pride in endangering the workman kindling the bonfire. Surmounting this hotbed of domestic homicide, there is his being peeved by something missing about Miranda’s energy, which he inflects into the general complaint, “I work hard all day [as a building crew foreman] and I have to come home and look at a bunch of long faces…” She turns her back—“Now you won’t have to see me”—and she refuses to eat so much as a bite of the heavy meal she has prepared (“I don’t want anything”), a stance that introduces a barely perceptible loving care into a firestorm of mutual devaluation and clownish fury. She erupts, in face of his badgering, “I’m going mad! I’ll put strychnine in your soup! I’ll kill myself first!” When, some months later, she is hospitalized with a terminal illness, she tells Titta (whose limitations, as with her brother, she chooses to mine rather than write off) she’s feeling better; but she muses on her wedding ring no longer fitting her finger, and Aurelio follows her signal and the course of her ordeal which he had not noticed until very late, with a stoic, saddened presence.

That could not come close to being a great instance of interpersonal love; but, as presented in this subtle and complex context, it is riveting in its own way. Convalescing from his uneven struggle with the tobacconist, Titta asks Miranda, “How did it happen with you and Dad?” Surprised by this resort, by her seemingly immature-for-life son, to the volatile phenomenon of love, she sums up her marriage as being dull and crude. “Your dad’s not a great one for compliments…” But in describing their mutual attraction a tincture of rebellion has to be acknowledged. “He was a laborer. My folks had a bit of money and didn’t think much of him… So we eloped without a word to anyone…” Being, despite all but swallowed up by conventional socioeconomic pressures (Her funeral is firmly in the hands of the Church and we see a priest fussing at the outset of the cortege, about getting a troupe of black-clad orphans in place; moreover, she anxiously stage-manages Titta’s Confession—“Not even water before” [it]), they did embrace risk and, within a close fit with much of conventional life, would, together, and tempestuously, taste the tang of something more.

Youngsters like Gradisca and Titta might have more boldly and consistently drawn away from the old and developed more intense areas of the new. (Her fling with a prince [cued by a town official looking for the latter’s investment in expanding the port], a figure not quite like Gary Cooper in Morocco, begins with her heartfelt bid to find cogent love, and ends with her mechanically assuming the gestures of a cheap hooker; his passion for the glamorous life is even less developed than his uncle’s, but it does light upon sensuous paths bucking a long trend, whether he knows it or not. With the onset of the countless, gracefully hovering snow crystals, he rushes from his sickbed, and his face registers true rapture, which lifts him decisively beyond that illness.) But Aurelio and Miranda, flattened though they are by pressures of survival (material and emotional), would have entered upon exigencies unapparent to mere rebels. Despite involving a similar welter of those dead ends which leave Fellini’s Roma almost deliriously dark, Amarcord, by providing rich protagonistic initiatives, makes its way to the misty vision of infiltrating what dimensions of “affection” can be elicited from within a deadened world history. (The near Ice Age of the incongruous snowfall pre-empts a movie audience [far more numerous than at that moment of musical chairs for Titta and Gradisca] getting into the swing of a lion’s roar. The exodus from the theatre and into the street neatly replicates the carnival scene where Genevieve gets fussy in Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; the relentless cascade of white also recalls the sign-off between the two lovers in that latter film.) Swooning in face of Il Duce, Gradisca cries out, “This enthusiasm makes us young and old at the same time!” But she has not effectively entered upon the mysteries of mixing that cocktail. Amarcord is especially remarkable in its directing attention, in light of flashy but lost bids, to the possibilities of effervescence latent within interplay almost entirely dull, jangled and ludicrous. Aurelio and Miranda undergo outings from the mental hospital by his retarded brother, driving them to a frenzy of frustration; but somehow they manage to stay the course. Aurelio shows us both his individualistic skepticism and his crippling obtuseness, when he scowls at the weather which occasions in everyone else big smiles. “Still snowing! Four days this goddamn thing’s been around!” This register of clown-show is something an ultra-chic agent like Cocteau could never have embraced. But it is something ironically indispensable to a film so laced with Futurist lightning. The two prominent (though all-but hidden) Belles and Bêtes here establish a problematic of synthesis amongst their strengths.

The film begins and, a year later, ends with feathery seeds being carried in the breeze, giving the locals to understand not only that “when the puffballs come, winter’s almost gone,” but also that it is in such motion that we really live. During Gradisca’s doing the honors of that other spring kickoff, one of her friend’s remarks, “It gives me a funny feeling!” (This so easily ignored law of nature is roughed up by the school staff, with their precious and bored recitations about the motion of pendulums, spirit in the realm of matter, perspective [in sacred paintings], mathematics and Greek. It is also a bit more charmingly compromised by a “lawyer”/ Chorus who nails down historical data as the supposed essence of the town’s integrity.) At one point, Aurelio’s dad finds himself disoriented in a thick fog. “I don’t seem to be anywhere,” he muses. Then he sneers, “If death is like this, I don’t think much of it. Everything’s gone. Well, up yours!” Moments later, Titta’s younger brother, on the way to school, goes past the old man, whose discomfort had been relieved (after a close encounter with a black vehicle that terrifies him) by a neighbor pointing out that he’s a few steps from his gate and the escapist gabfest within. The preamble to presenting Miranda’s death has him being whisked away, in light of his not being able to countenance the bite of finitude. By contrast, on that walk to school, the boy walks past dead trees forming the configuration of donkeys. He doesn’t notice that; but he notices a cow, which causes him to run away quickly, into the safety of the soft fog. The upshot here, amidst rather clownish actions, is to give us a perspective upon death and dignity being not for old men and little boys. The “I Remember” sense of the term Amarcord looks to remembering how close to and yet so far from consummate power those days were and still are.

by John Grant

US / 91 minutes / bw / Columbia Dir & Pr: Leo McCarey Scr: Viña Delmar Story: The Awful Truth (1924 play) by Arthur Richman Cine: Joseph Walker Cast: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, Alexander D’Arcy, Cecil Cunningham, Molly Lamont, Esther Dale, Joyce Compton, Robert Allen, Robert Warwick, Mary Forbes, Kathryn Curry, Miki Morita, Asta.

One of the first screwball comedies and among the best, this has at its core the romantic story of the realization by an unfaithful husband that, in point of fact, it’s his wife whom he loves the most, alongside her realization that, despite his infidelities, she loves right back. It’s based on a play that was earlier filmed as a silent in 1925, dir Paul Powell, with Agnes Ayres, Warner Baxter and Raymond Lowney, and as a now presumed lost talkie in 1929, dir Marshall Neilan, with Ina Claire, Henry Daniell and Paul Harvey. A later musical reworking was Let’s Do It Again (1953) dir Alexander Hall, with Jane Wyman, Ray Milland and Aldo Ray. I haven’t seen any of the other adaptations, alas, so I can’t draw any comparisons.

The version under discussion here betrays its stage origins in that it’s made up of a number of discrete scenes; those scenes are often almost independent set pieces, or sketches, so the movie comes to have a cellular structure along the lines of, to use a much later and highly dissimilar example, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975): a string of sketches is linked together by an overarching plot. Rewatching the movie after a long interval—approaching half a century, I think—I found that, aside from the general plot, which I vaguely recalled, I was greeting some of the scenes/sketches as old friends while others I’d entirely forgotten. Some of the characters appear in a single scene/sketch and then vanish from the story, such as the Warriners’ maid Celeste (Curry) or—although there’s a major caveat in this instance—the scandalous dancer Dixie Belle Lee (is her name a nod to Gypsy Rose?). A couple of scenes/sketches could have come from a musical. The net effect is that we end the movie feeling as if we’ve enjoyed a—very satisfying—evening of variety (near-burleyQ) entertainment rather than a single offering.

Rich playboy Jerry Warriner (Grant) returns home, supposedly from a trip to Florida but quite apparently from a fling, to find that his wife Lucy (Dunne) has spent the night away from home in company with her music teacher, the dashing Armand Duvalle (D’Arcy). She maintains it was merely a matter of an automobile breakdown (“You’ve come home and caught me in a truth, and there’s nothing less logical than the truth”); Jerry, however, either genuinely suspecting the worst or merely attempting to deflect attention from his own duplicity, makes a deal of it, and the next the couple know they’re talking divorce. The court grants an interlocutory decree of divorce, which will become final within 90 days.

And then comes a brief but memorable sketch as the couple argue over who should have custody of their Asta-like terrier, Mr. Smith . . . in fact, not so much Asta-like but actually played by Asta! The judge decrees that the dog himself must be the one to decide, and the couple are set up with Mr. Smith between them: whoever he goes to first wins him. It’s an appealing piece of silliness, not least because Lucy wins by cheating.

Lucy takes an apartment with her acerbic, worldly wise aunt, Patsy Adams (Cunningham); oddly, Lucy alone calls her not Patsy but Patty throughout. Aunt Patsy urges her to move on with her life, and even does the heavy lifting by picking up a man on her behalf: Dan Leeson (Bellamy), an amiable, seemingly kindly but deathly unimaginative Oklahoman who’s made his fortune in oil and is visiting the Big City with his mother (Dale) but doesn’t plan to stay. Whether it’s his dough or the rebound effect or just an urge to show Jerry a thing or two, soon there’s talk of engagement in the air—even though Mrs. Leeson cannot hide her suspicions of her prospective daughter-in-law, especially when she picks up some juicy gossip about a certain French music teacher . . .

Jerry, despite professed delight at his imminent freedom and his frequent shows of goodwill toward the couple, is immensely jealous. To demonstrate to Lucy that he’s not without his own attractions, he allows her and Dan to come across him dating a much younger chanteuse, Dixie Belle Lee (Compton), in the nightclub where she’s a headliner. Dixie Belle comes across as an absolute sweetheart as she explains that she operates under a stage name because her conservative mother believes that somehow singing isn’t really a job. The three agree to wait for her act . . . which, when it comes, is sufficiently outrageous that Jerry is soon hurriedly blurting, “I’ve only just met her.” The performance and the trio’s reaction to it comprise one of the funniest set pieces in the movie. As Dixie Lee sings a woesomely trite song about the old cottage that was home, every now and then she encounters the phrase “gone with the wind” or some equivalent, at which point an under-stage fan blows her dress up over her shoulders, revealing—gasp!—her smalls. Says Lucy tartly: “I guess it was easier for her to change her name than for her whole family to change theirs.” The real joke, though, is that Compton exudes such bubbly innocence throughout that the display is absolutely innocuous.

Later in the movie, when Jerry is lining himself up to become engaged to fabulously rich and very pretty heiress Barbara Vance (Lamont), there’s a reprise of Dixie Belle’s performance. Through circumstances, Jerry has had to pretend that Lucy is his sister. At a soiree where he’s trying to impress Barbara and his inlaws-to-be (Warwick, Forbes), Lucy—as “sister Lola”—makes an entrance and, after publicly puncturing a few of Jerry’s bubbles of pretension, proceeds to emulate Dixie Belle’s “My Dreams are Gone with the Wind”; she doesn’t have an under-stage fan, of course, but, in a quite brilliant piece of physical comedy, Dunne manages to give the impression of her skirt being blown up around her hips. This rendition alone is worth the price of admission. Not only is it very funny—Dunne was one of the screen’s great comediennes—but it’s funny in a quite different way from the Dixie Belle version. Where Dixie Belle’s naivety and all-around wholesomeness made her performance seem gloriously innocent, as if we were laughing at a child who’d triumphantly jumped in a puddle, Dunne’s imitation does carry a sexual charge. And that charge affects her viewers differently: the stuffy Vance parents (and their daughter) are appalled by such a display while Jerry receives a not-uncertain message about the delights he’s planning to abjure.

By this time Dan’s out of the picture after the events of another raucously funny sketch—perhaps the movie’s most ambitious. Here we have all the groundwork for the kind of bedroom farce that two or three decades later would start to make London’s Whitehall Theatre internationally famous. We’ve noted Jerry’s inappropriate jealousy. With Dan he can control it, but his wrath still boils for the suave music teacher Armand. We’ve already seen him indulge in some knockabout slapstick when interrupting what he assumed would be a tryst between Armand and Lucy but proved instead to be a po-faced salon recital, Lucy singing and Armand accompanying on the piano. (Eventually Jerry’s chair collapses under him; Lucy’s smile-turning-to-laughter as she realizes how much she loves him is arguably the movie’s single most romantic moment.)

Now Armand comes to visit Lucy to tell her there’s no need for apology. When Jerry arrives, Armand slips into her bedroom out of sight, to avoid confrontation . . . but inadvertently leaving his bowler hat behind. Jerry arrives wearing a bowler of his own (nowhere else does Jerry wear a bowler; again, we feel we’re watching a string of brilliant sketches rather than a unitary piece), and there’s an elaborate routine involving the two bowler hats and a hide-and-seek game with Mr. Smith. Lucy somehow manages to allay any suspicions Jerry might have. But then Dan arrives with  mother in tow. Before Lucy can stop him, Jerry has slipped into her bedroom to keep out of sight of Dan. The fight that ensues when Jerry finds Armand already there nixes any plans Lucy might have had of wedding Dan, who assumes she’s enticed to her boudoir not one but two former lovers . . .

The final sketch is yet another brilliantly conceived piece of cinema. Jerry and Lucy find themselves stranded for the night in adjoining rooms at Aunt Patsy’s remote country lodge (don’t ask). The wind is up, and the intervening door occasionally blows open, betweentimes rattling in uncanny imitation of that distinctive noise you hear through the wall of a motel bedroom. As the minutes tick down toward midnight, the moment when the couple’s divorce finally becomes absolute, Jerry more than once comes to the door to close it, each time seeing his soon-to-be-ex-wife languishing yet more desirably in her own bed. (There’s a certain amount of Barbara Stanwyck in Dunne’s performance in this movie, but it’s hard to imagine that Stanwyck would have allowed herself to look so blatantly, well, fuckable as Dunne does here.) By way of accompaniment, the quarter-hours are being sounded by a Swiss clock: at each chiming, a male and a female figure emerge from two doors in the clock face . . . until finally, when Jerry comes to the obvious conclusion about his own fatheadedness, the male figure crosses the divide and follows the female into her door.

Which firmly shuts as the closing credits begin. Also, as it happens, that last sounding of the clock was for midnight, so really what’s going on unseen by us has just become technically extramarital. It’s lucky for Middle America that it survived this onslaught of immorality.

I think it was Bergen Evans who once observed that the merest milquetoast, if married, likely has a more imaginative and varied sex life than do most Casanovas. This seems to be one of the prime messages of The Awful Truth, a piece that’s quite astonishingly preoccupied with sex. (It’s a tribute to the charm with which this is conveyed that the movie didn’t run afoul of the Hays Code.) The romance that lies at its core is married romance. Jerry has made the classic error of believing the grass on the other side of the fence is greener; his sexual fling at the movie’s outset is a betrayal not just of Lucy but, even more fundamentally, of himself. Perhaps the girl was younger and prettier, perhaps he needed to prove himself to himself as adolescent males so often do—and much as later he tries to prove himself to both himself and Lucy by knocking around with the younger and arguably prettier Dixie Belle and Barbara (and the latter even has pots of money!). Whatever the case, we can assume the fling was a pursuit of sex perpetrated in defiance of the romance Jerry has in his marriage.

It’s Lucy who, post-interlocutory decree, first spots how confoundedly sexy her spouse is—confoundedly sexy not because of himself (viewed dispassionately, he’s a self-absorbed klutz) but because she sees him in the context of their romance, a romance that’s ongoing whether they’re aware of it or not. It takes Jerry a while longer to recognize that his acts of jealousy aren’t just products of a petty possessiveness but defensive reactions to the threats the unacknowledged marital romance faces. When he finally sees (and we see through his eyes) how scintillatingly sexually alluring his wife is, as she lies in her bed in the cabin, it’s because the cloud that he has permitted to cover the light of their romance has finally been blown clear. Sex is a pretty damn’ fine thing, the movie seems to be telling us, but there ain’t no sex can compete with the sex we have within a romance.

The theme of a married couple suffering some kind of a fission such that the two parties are on the brink of marrying others before discovering that in reality they belong best to each other was a recurring trope in Hollywood’s golden age, mostly as inspiration for comedy romances. In My Favorite Wife (1940), which has the same director and stars as The Awful Truth, Dunne’s character is presumed dead but returns to civilization immediately after the marriage of her supposed widower husband (Grant) to another (Gail Patrick); discovering the truth, he postpones the consummation . . . to great comic effect. This was remade as Move Over, Darling (1963) dir Michael Gordon, with Doris Day, James Garner and Polly Bergen in the appropriate roles. In The Philadelphia Story (1940) dir George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn’s character falls in love all over again with her ex-husband (Grant once more). In That Uncertain Feeling (1941) dir Ernst Lubitsch, Merle Oberon’s character divorces her husband (Melvyn Douglas) in favor of another man (Burgess Meredith) before realizing that in truth she still loves her existing husband. In Random Harvest (1942), a rare drama to utilize the theme, an ex-serviceman (Ronald Colman), rendered amnesiac through shellshock, almost marries a much younger woman (Susan Peters) while oblivious to the fact that his secretary (Greer Garson) is his real wife. There are plenty of other examples.

But The Awful Truth is arguably the best of them. Audiences at the time thought so too—as did the Academy. McCarey won an Oscar as Best Director and the movie was nominated for five others: Best Picture, Best Actress (Dunne), Best Supporting Actor (Bellamy), Best Screenplay and Best Editing (Al Clark). In 1996 the National Film Preservation Board added it to the National Film Registry as a movie of historical importance. It was a career-maker for Grant, who hereafter would carry the same persona through most of his screen roles. It put the screwball comedy on the map. And it still gives us a chance today to see that irrepressible, irreplaceable comic genius Irene Dunne at the height of her powers.

by Sam Juliano

The ABCs of opera.  Aida.  Boheme.  Carmen.  This triptych expression has come to denote not only the essentials for a newcomer to the form, but also the most pared down assessment of these three quintessential works that continue to rate among the most performed operas year after year worldwide.  The middle of the three, Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 La Boheme may well have emerged the most popular opera of all-time over the past ten or fifteen years if we further examine some telling statistics.  Certainly there can be little doubt that it is the most perfectly composed of the composer’s works, and the one that boasts the most clarity of structure.  It is also (along with Carmen) one of the two most frequently mentioned operas by musicologists to have made converts of non-believers of the form.  La Boheme is the perfect choice for one’s first introduction to opera, whether in attendance at the opera house, via HD broadcast or on an audio CD.  Charming, sublime, lyrical, sentimental and suffused with soaring emotions, this four-act work of moderate length (by opera standards) is finally unbearably poignant, but along the way it showcases some of the most beautiful music ever written.  Puccini’s incomparable melodic felicity -often attacked back in the day as shameless and ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve – by the cynics, is now regarded as old-fashioned melody-making that very few have been able successfully emulate.  Though the composer crafted several operas that border on master-class (Turandot, La Fanciula de West, Manon Lescaut, Gianni Schicchi -the latter contains the beloved suprano aria “O Mio Babbino Caro” while the first-mentioned features the electrifying tenor standard “Nessun Dorma”) La Boheme is one of the three unquestioned masterpieces (Tosca and Madama Butterfly are the others) that have beguiled and ravished opera goers for many decades, and no doubt will continue to do so well into the future.

In 1890 Giacomo Puccini was basically just another impoverished Italian composer, one of many jockeying to reach poll position as heir apparent to the great Verdi.  His very first opera enjoyed moderate success, but the second was an unmitigated failure.  This led the opera critics of the day to write early obituaries for the young upstart from Lucca, before he astounded them with his breakthrough work Manon Lescaut three years later.  It was the first of what were to be four collaborations with the librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica.  This turned out to be a working relationship wrought with disputes, complaints and multiple near-break ups, yet through some stroke of luck they persevered to produce four of the most enduring operas of all-time, starting with the aforementioned Manon Lescaut.   Puccini had been hunting for a subject for months before he discovered Henri Murger’s Scenes de la vie de Boheme, a novel based on the author’s irresponsible  youth while becoming an artist.  Together with Illica and Giacosa, Puccini labored for three years  to transform the material into its final dramatic form.  Along the way there were many revisions – Illica and Giacosa were often exasperated – but stayed on, and Puccini worked hard to better another version of the opera that was being composed by friend and rival Ruggero Leoncavallo.  Puccini’s version bettered it by quite some distance,  and the noted verismo style seemed a much better fit that the light comedy of the first act that Leoncavallo composed.  No other art is so attuned to fleeting romanticism like opera.  Fleeting in the sense that the moorings of most operatic works are steeped in passionate love affairs that invariable end in tragedy.  Most of the dying characters are women of a young age, though mutual demise is another theme explored regularly.

 In their gloomy Latin Quarter garret in Paris, the practically destitute artists Marcello and poet Rodolfo try to stay warm on Christmas Eve by feeding the stove with pages from Rodolfo’s drama.  They are soon joined by their roomates – Colline, a young philosopher, and Schaunard, a musician, who brings food, fuel and funds. Benoit, their landlord enters to ask for the rent, but they skillfully evade him.  As the others depart Rodolfo stays behind to complete an article, promising to catch up with them imminently.  A young and timid seamstress Mimi shyly knocks at the door to ask for a light for her candle.  Rodolfo is charmed and proceeds to prolong the encounter; he tells her about himself, and shares with her his dreams of love in one of the most rapturous and progressively romantic tenor arias in all of opera, “Che gelida manina” (Your tiny hand is frozen…what an icy little hand, let me warm it……Who am I?  I am a poet……I have no worldly riches, but every poem is a treasure.  So in poverty I am a millionaire.  Mimi in turn introduces herself, describing her loneliness and attic lodgings, proceeding to deliver one of the most poetic and lilting soprano arias in all of opera, “Mi chiamano Mimi” (They call me Mimi……yes they call me Mimi, but my name is Lucia.  My story is short.  I make my living by sewing and embroidering.  I am quiet and cheerful….I live in a little garret room overlooking the sky.)   Mini’s simple, and powerfully impassioned proclamation to the sun and the April spring:

ma quando vien lo sgelo
il primo sole è mio
il primo bacio dell’aprile è mio!
Germoglia in un vaso una rosa…
Foglia a foglia la spio!

….is the most blissful of all romantic lead-ins, and one of Giacosa’s most poetic stanzas.  Some of the best sopranos have always counted this among their most coveted passages of one of the greatest roles in all of opera.  No soprano of true worth did not deliver the goods with this role, those it’s a tricky proposition to assert which singers were most prominent in the role.

The shouts of Rodolfo’s friends from the courtyard below call him to the window; the moonlight flooding the room, shines directly on Mimi’s face and Rodolfo is overcome with emotion.  Both embrace and sing the opera’s most famous duet, the ecstatic “O soave fanciulla.”  The number combined the most rapturous sections of “Che Gelida Manina” and “Mi chiamano Mini” to create one of the score’s most ravishing passages, and a full declaration of the couple’s love for each other.  They then go off to join Rodolfo’s friends at the Cafe Momus.

The orchestral music that provides as a segue into the opera’s second act is properly celebratory and it underscores the bustling and brightly lit street in the Latin Quarter where Rodolfo and Mimi meet the other Bohemians outside the Cafe Momus.  The entrance of Marcello’s erstwhile mistress, Musetta, causes a sensation, as she is on the arm of a wealthy admirer, Alcindoro.  She situates at a neighboring table and attempts to attract Marcello’s attention by singing of the amorous allure her appearance inspires.  The waltz song “Quando me’n vo’ soletta per la vie” (When I walk alone in the street, people praise my beauty from head to toe.  You must still love me; why don’t you return?  Marcello, after some initial irritation, capitulates; Musetta creates a scene to get rid of Alcindoro, and throws herself into her former lover’s arms. Disaster strikes when the bill is presented, and it is unknown who will pick it up.  As a military band approaches, the Bohemians disappear into crowd.  Alcindoro re-enters to find Musetta absent and collapses in disbelief at the huge bill left for him.  This scene exudes an erotic decadence as Musetta’s profession is clear enough, and the implied promiscuity of the flirty waltz maneuvers is highly sexual in tone.  Many opera fans consider this the most captivating aria in the score, and it immediately won international solo licensing after the work debuted.

Act III opens outside a tavern on the fringes of Paris.  It is envisioned superlatively in the film version of the opera that is actually the subject of this essay, even if it has not yet been discussed.  It is bleak and snowy morning in February; street-sweepers and peasants pass by on their way to the city.  There is a clear sense of foreboding when Mini is unveiled here as weak and afflicted by a nagging cough.  She is looking for Marcello, who promptly walks out of the tavern.  She informs him of all her troubles, telling him how Rodolfo torments her with his constant jealousy.    When Rodolfo himself appears  Mini retreats in confusion, hoping to avert a confrontation.  Roldolfo tells Marcello a different story: his jealous fits hide despair over Mimi’s increasingly serious illness.  Mimi’s coughs and sobs announce her presence just as Marcello, hearing Musetta’s laugh, rushes back inside.  Rodolfo and Mini agree that they must part, but sing poignantly of their love in a sublime duet that further prove that melodic invention is evenly dispersed throughout the opera.  Marcello and Musetta exchange insults while Rodolfo and Mimi agree to stay together until the coming of spring, turning the end of the act into one of the most beloved quartets in all of opera.

The opera’s final act is staged again in the Bohemians’ garret.  It is clear enough that a few months have passed.  Rodolfo and Marcello are discussing Mimi and Musetta.  They feign indifference, but reveal their true feelings in a lovely and aching tenor-baritone duet “Ah, Mimi, tu piu non torni” as each mourns for his former sweetheart.  Colline and Schaunard arrive, and the four friends enact a series of charades culminating in a frantic mock duel.  Musetta’s sudden appearance shatters the mood with new that Mimi is extremely ill with consumption.  She is brought in, and her dire conditions spurs the Bohemians to scrape together money for a doctor.  Colline moves to pawn his old coat, and sings it an elegiac aria of farewell – “Vecchia zimarra.”  Alone at this point, Rodolfo and Mimi reminisce about their first meeting.  The others return, and Mimi slowly drifts into a coma.  As Rodolfo comforts her Schaunard discovers that her sleep will be permanent.  The opera ends on Rodolfo’s anguished cries.

The 1965 film version of La Boheme was directed by one of opera’s most celebrated icons, Franco Zeffirelli, whose painterly eye and aesthetic traditionalism is a perfect fit for a work that boasts some ravishing settings.  The director uses his camera to acentuate some rather vital plots points.  One, the key-dropping in the first act that occurs just before “Che Gelida Manina” is normally obscure in stage productions, but is rescued here by the ever-reliable zoom close-up.  During the delightful Cafe Momus segment the director swings back and forth in accord with the movement that could only be scene as part of the general picture on the stage.  Zeffirelli’s attention to physical movement superbly compliments the rousing on-rushing timber of the aria.   The director is generous with close-ups of his stars, the now-legendary Mirella Freni (Mimi), who at that time was rising to supreme prominence, and the underrated Gianni Raimondi (Rodolfo), whose robust, well-modulated voice gives more authenticity to the Bohemian he is playing.  Physically he is appropriately non-descript, perfect in a way that more high profile singers like Lucio Pavarotti were not.  Freni’s silvery voice (no other singer can match her “Mi Chiamano Mimi”) and telling facial expressions are the domain of the film director, and in this sense such captures trump anything that can be negotiated in an opera house.  Exceptional singing was rendered by Rolando Panerai as Marcello, Gianni Maffeo as Schaunard, and Ivo Vinco as Colline, while as Musetta, Adrianao Martino is wholly extraordinary in her big number.

The tempos are seemingly perfect, the renowned conductor Herbert von Karajan, the La Scala orchestra and the cast recorded the soundtrack at the Munich Opera, while Zeffirelli employed that exquisite eye for detail, set design and costume to craft the best-looking Boheme that film could possibly achieve.

No doubt luck and timing allowed for such a magnificent film version of an opera to become part of the permanent record.  Zeffirelli and a stellar cast, a first-rate conductor with one of the great opera orchestras under his baton, and a true feel for the bohemian life on the outskirts of Paris.

Franco Zeffirelli’s filmed opera of La Boheme is a masterpiece of a masterpiece.

by Shubhajit Lahiri

Woman of the Lake, directed by Yoshishige Yoshida, aka Kiju Yoshida, one of the most influential members and great intellectuals of the Japanese New Wave movement, was a lyrical, disquieting and beautifully shot meditation on urban alienation, existential crisis, marital fidelity, and the complex dynamics of love and lust. This was the 2^nd film in the director’s thematically & stylistically connected series of 6 films, made right after his parting ways with Shochiku Studio, which has been loosely qualified as “Anti-Melodramas”. All were shot in B/W (except for one), starred his glorious wife-cum-muse Okada, and fabulously deconstructed the melodrama form of filmmaking by imbuing them with a dark, edgy, layered, psychologically dense, thematically rich and stylistically dazzling signature.

It was preceded by A Story Written with Water(a troubling account of mother-son relationship with all its repressed desires and associated guilt), and was followed by The Affair/Joen(a bravura and powerful examination of a mother’s memory on her daughter and how it shapes her relationship with men – possibly the best film of the lot along with the one under focus), Flame & Women(an incisive probe into psychological questions and moral dilemmas through the topic of artificial insemination), Affair in the Snow (portrayal of the dichotomy and irony of choosing between sexual prowess and emotional connect, and a complementary and companion piece to Woman of the Lake) and Farewell to Summer Light (a lilting take on questions of memory and ephemerality of relationships that is sure to remind one of Linklater’s “Before Trilogy”, and the only one shot in colour).

Yoshida established the basic premise of the film, based on a novel by Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, within the first 15 minutes or so. Miyako (Mariko Okada), a 30-something strikingly beautiful married lady, is embroiled in a vacuous extra-marital affair with a young man. Even though she brushes off his advances for marriage – her husband is after all a rich man – she agrees to being photographed in the nude for him. Unfortunately, while on her way home in the night, her handbag, containing the damaging negatives, fall in the hands of a stranger. As expected, she is drawn into a game of blackmail when she’s instructed to board a train to another town to meet him; but, in a marvelous reversal to audience expectations, she’s drawn into a complex relationship with the man, which was reminiscent of Imamura’s fascinating Intentions of Murder (incidentally both had Shigeru Tsuyuguchi in similar roles).

Yoshida infused the leisurely paced narrative with themes of loneliness and sexual frustration (a recurring thread in his ‘Anti-Melodrama’ series – perhaps on account of his relationship with one of the most alluring and popular Japanese actresses of his time), and complemented them with melancholic tone, haunting imageries and long moments of silence. The expressionistic yet subdued (as opposed to high contrast) B/W photography, with its share of silhouettes and chiaroscuro, was the most striking aspects of this brilliant film with a superb central performance by Okada. In a gleefully self-reflexive touch and as a post-script to this write-up, there was a B-film shoot sequence where the body double of the heroine is brazenly exploited by its makers, which aptly highlighted and counterpointed the film’s premise.

This was, for all practical purposes, a romantic melodrama, but one that was diametrically opposite to the conventional kind in keeping with Yoshida’s style, in particular, and the radical, deconstructive and audacious tonal, thematic and stylistic experiments that had formed the cornerstone of Japanese New Wave filmmakers like Imamura, Teshigahara, Oshima, Shindo, Kurahara, Shinoda et al.

Book reading by celebrated children’s book author/illustrator Peter Brown at Word bookstore/cafe in Jersey City, N.J.

Richard Linklater’s visionary “Boyhood” in the best film of 2014.

by Sam Juliano

The romantic countdown is doing quite nicely, with elevated comment totals of late and a real sense of purpose by both the motivated writers and those inspire to contribute on the corresponding threads.  We aren’t so far from the half way point in fact.

Thanks so much to our Guardian Angel Dee Dee for her continued attendance to the sidebar.  And thanks to all who spend even seconds at the site leaving ‘likes’ or acknowledgements.

Summer moves forward, as does the program I am teaching until August 8th.

Lucille and the gang came along for two new releases this week in theaters.  We also attended a book reading and presentation at the Word Bookstore in Jersey City.  Peter Brown of Mr. Tiger Goes Wild fame was on hand as per my FB report:

Peter Brown made an appearance at 11:00 A.M. Sunday at the ‘Word’ bookstore and cafe on Newark Avenue in Jersey City to promote his new book “My Teacher is a Monster.” The delighted crowd, which included many youngsters were treated to a dramatic reading, illustration demonstration, and book-signing by one of America’s pre-eminent children’s book author-illustrators. Brown, whose “Mr. Tiger Goes Wild” was widely seen as a favorite for the Caldecott Medal last year, distributed some terrific button pins and sticker sheets to those in attendance at the event. 

We saw BOYHOOD and DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.  Lucille and I must attend a 6:00 wedding in the Bronx, so I am unable to write about the films at this time.  Suffice to say Richard Linklater’s BOYHOOD is a masterpiece (no I did not overuse the word here, thank you!) and the very best film of 2014.  APES?  Well, the kids liked it, but I could have done without.

Boyhood  *****     (Saturday night)   IFC Film Center

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes  **  (Friday)  Starplex

By Jon Warner

There are few romantic films that are as beloved and cherished as John Ford’s beautiful and heartwarming classic, The Quiet Man. Intended for years as a pet project, Ford hand selected the story, the stars and the setting of Ireland in order to bring together many elements that meant a great deal to him. Ford’s Irish heritage, and that of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, turned the film into a sort cinematic expression of anthropology, extending the elements of the plot beyond simple mechanics and enlivening the whole film with a passionate and joyful sense of place, family, and tradition (all very consistent with Ford’s career). These elements reached into the lives of those making the film, and in turn, these personal connections become visible to the audience. In a sense, this film is as much a love story between Ford and his fondness for Ireland and for heritage, as much as anything else. But the fact that the film is buoyed by intense chemistry from Wayne and O’Hara, many romantic scenes, and a charming, sexually playful tone, it’s hard to top this film for sheer enjoyment.

Ford had read the short story by Maurice Walsh back in 1933 and had purchased the rights to the story but the film took years to take shape. It’s a story of an Irish-born man named Sean Thornton (John Wayne) who has been living in America for much of his life, but who after giving up boxing on account of a fatal bout he participated in, ends up desiring to return to his birth-town of Inisfree to claim his family farm. Upon arriving in Ireland, he finds that another man in town, Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen), wants the land as well. Sean ends up gaining the rights to the farm, but earns an enemy in Will Danaher at the same time. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that Sean quickly has eyes for Will’s fiery sister, Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara). Sean soon finds himself in a familial battle of wits, as he pushes against tradition in order to ask Mary Kate’s hand in marriage without consent from Will. Through some trickery from the townsfolk, Sean is able to wed Mary Kate, however Will holds back the dowry that is owed to her. Mary Kate then decides that she’s going to withhold…..ahem…..the goods from Sean until she gets her dowry back. Thus, the film then turns into a sly and farcical bit of romantic shenanigan-ism as the marriage remains unconsummated and the tension between Sean and Will grows. That is until the final showdown between Sean and Will to decide the fate of the marriage and to recoup the fateful dowry.

Even getting this film off the ground took a bit of doing for Ford. It took some time to get financing, and this finally came from Republic Pictures, who needed Ford and Wayne to do a moneymaking picture prior to filming in order to fund the cost of The Quiet Man. They embarked on making Rio Grande, which isn’t just notable for its standing amongst Ford’s westerns and the Cavalry Trilogy, but also because it paired up Wayne and O’Hara for the first time. It’s plain to see in Rio Grande that the two were a match made in cinematic heaven. It’s no wonder that Ford had eyed these two stars for The Quiet Man as well. Ford had of course worked with Wayne often, and with O’Hara years earlier in How Green Was My Valley. But Ford’s brilliant pairing of Wayne and O’Hara makes The Quiet Man into the memorable romantic picture that it is. Many have noted how Wayne and O’Hara make a great onscreen pair and it has to do with each having an equalizing presence upon the other, meaning that it never quite seems like one is overshadowing the other. Their chemistry together in this film forces them to have a physical and demanding experience together, whether swinging punches at each other, scrambling through creeks and over lush countrysides, and then squaring off in the bedroom for the rights to the upper hand. Their passionate quarreling is only rivaled by their passionate kisses. On multiple occasions, this film has some memorable kissing scenes. Probably the most iconic moment is when Sean enters his farm for the first time to find someone has been tidying up, and there’s a windstorm blowing. He manages to scare Mary Kate out of the house and as the door bursts open, she runs to leave, whereby he swings her back through the open door, then pulls her to him for a kiss. Spielberg’s use of this scene in E.T. made it extra iconic, but there are other memorable moments as well, like when the two kiss in the rain in the cemetery. It’s such a lovely quiet moment between the two of them with wordless interplay as O’Hara pulls in close to Wayne, with his shirt soaking wet. Then there’s the scene on the wedding night as Sean breaks down the door, pulls Mary Kate’s hair back and kisses her in a rough moment of passion. And that’s what makes Wayne and O’Hara such a striking match, as their physicality and passion is believable. So much so, that we can imagine what might happen were they to hop into bed. Indeed, the film has lots of fun, stalling out the consummation of marriage as long as it can possibly go for comedic effect. Like when Michaeleen Oge Flyn (Barry Fitzgerald) happens to stop by the house bringing furniture and catches a glimpse of the broken bed after the first night of marriage, saying, “impetuous”, quietly to himself. Little does he realize what caused the broken bed.

With many exterior shots filmed in Ireland, the film has a strong sense of place, and a beautiful, lush look to it. The wonderful cinematography of Winton C. Hoch adds much to the film and the on-location shooting is enlivened wih elegant framing. Victor Young’s score incorporates many elements of Irish tunes, giving the film a bouncing and jovial quality. Ford’s cast of familiar characters like McLaglen, Ward Bond, and Mildred Natwick add color and warmth to their roles, and many other parts were given to locals in Ireland as well as various bit parts to family members of Wayne, O’Hara and Ford. It’s Wayne and O’Hara that make everything shine, though, and their performances are some of the finest of their careers. A couple moments are noteworthy. Wayne has just had a beer tossed on his face and says in a rather matter of fact tone, “bar towel”. He wipes his face and then asks for the time. He’s told it’s half past five, and then proceeds to punch McLaglen. He does all this with such perfect tone that it confirms that Wayne’s sense of comedic timing was one of his most underrated skills. My favorite moment of O’Hara’s is the moment when Wayne comes to the door to come courting. She nervously comes talking to her brother at the table to ask for permission to go out with him. Her tone of voice here, and the way she is almost out of breath with anxiousness and nervousness seems real. You can hear the sexual charge within her, as she’s desperate to go out with Sean, but can hardly contain her nerves. Beautiful acting.

In the realm of cinematic pairings, the best ones are the ones in which you can believe the two really have eyes for each other, or at least create characters whom you believe really want each other. In the final moments of the film, Mary Kate and Sean are seen happily waving at Rev. Playfair from the edge of their farm. This moment to me is one of the brilliant examples of what makes this film work. Watching closely, we witness Mary Kate whisper something into Sean’s ear. They’re both grinning and then she turns and begins to jaunt back to the house, with Sean soon running and tumbling after. And in my mind, there’s only one place where they could possibly be headed.

by Duane Porter

Vikar Jerome, the protagonist of Steve Erickson’s novel, Zeroville (2007), set in 1970′s Hollywood, has a picture of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his shaved head, “their faces barely apart, lips barely apart, in each other’s arms on a terrace, the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies, she the female version of him, and he the male version of her.” This is the terrace scene from George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun and it is 1969 and no one shaves their head and no one has tattoos. Vikar has been known to react violently when curious onlookers misidentify the couple as James Dean and Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause. It might be hard to find someone that passionate about this movie today, but there are still a few of us captivated by its beautiful delirium.

As it begins, a young man wearing a black leather jacket over a white t-shirt is standing at the side of the highway trying to catch a ride. He turns to look at a huge picture of a bathing beauty on a billboard that declares, “It’s an Eastman.” It’s an image very much like the one in his dreams. Just then, a brand-new Cadillac convertible zooms by and the pretty girl behind the wheel beeps her horn, leaving him standing there as she speeds down the road, a departing vision of his American Dream. Finally, a beat-up old truck, filled with junk, stops and he gets a ride into town. He gets out in front of a large building that has the name, “EASTMAN,” engraved in large letters over the entrance.

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He is George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) and he has come seeking a job at this manufacturing plant, that makes bathing suits, owned by his rich uncle Charles Eastman. Uncle Charles is not in his office and George is asked to come by the house later that evening. George arrives, feeling awkward in a 35 dollar suit he purchased just a few hours before, and is uncomfortably trying to make conversation with his somewhat stuffy relatives when he hears the same distinctive car horn he heard earlier that day out on the highway. The room is soon overtaken by the presence of Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor) who has come to pick up George’s cousin, Earl. She doesn’t even notice George but he is struck by her startling beauty.

George is given an entry level position stacking boxes on a cart. The weeks go by and as he becomes more comfortable he begins noticing the girls who work on the line. In the evening a neon sign flashes the name Vickers through his apartment window and from time to time he sees that shiny convertible around town. Bored and lonely, he goes into a movie theater and finds an empty seat. Looking around, he recognizes one of the girls from the plant, she smiles and he moves to the seat next to her. “Small world,” she says. He walks her home, kisses her goodnight, and despite a very strict non-fraternization rule, George and Alice (Shelley Winters) begin their unfortunate affair.

George is more or less reconciled to his life with Alice when, one day, during an inspection tour of the plant, Uncle Charles notices George still stacking boxes and decides it is time to move him to a more responsible position. He invites George to a party at the house so they can have time to talk it over. At the party, George doesn’t know anyone and is ignored by the other guests. He gravitates to an empty room occupied by a large pool table and takes a few practice shots. As he is making a particularly difficult three-rail bank shot, Angela Vickers happens by and, halfway entering the room just as the ball drops, whispers, “wow.” George looks up. She smiles and says, “hello.” He responds, “hello,” and the whole world is changed.

Alice is waiting, she is jealous, she is whiny, and she is in trouble. She is afraid and she needs George to take care of her. He tells her everything will be alright, that he will find a doctor. But everything will not be alright. He doesn’t know what to do with her and she is not simply going to go away. He’s going to have to think of something.

Suddenly, the soap opera melts away and all we see is Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor dancing close together. The face of Elizabeth Taylor fills the screen, the most beautiful woman in the world at the age of seventeen. Then cut to Montgomery Clift, withdrawn and troubled. She wants to know why. He tells her, “I love you. I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you. I guess maybe I’ve even loved you before I saw you.” She starts to respond, but then becomes aware of all the people around them and frantically leads him onto the terrace. We’re now so close to them their faces won’t even fit on the screen. She says, “I love you, too. It scares me. But it is a wonderful feeling.” In anguish he replies, “If I could only tell you how much I love you, If I could only tell you all.” She holds him closer and whispers, “Tell Mama, tell Mama all.” They kiss and the chemistry between Monty and Liz is overwhelming. This just might be the most deeply romantic moment ever put on film.

A Place in the Sun was adapted from the novel An American Tragedy (1925) by Theodore Dreiser as well as Patrick Kearney’s subsequent dramatization of the novel. This book had previously been the basis for the 1931 film by Josef von Sternberg also titled An American Tragedy. Dreiser based his story on the sensational Chester Gillette – Grace Brown murder case of 1906. Grace was pregnant with Gillette’s baby and wanted him to marry her. They spent the afternoon on a lake in a rented boat and Grace ended up drowned. Although Gillette claimed she had committed suicide, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and he was later executed. Echoes of this story can also be found in F. W. Murnau’s silent movie masterpiece, Sunrise (1927).

George Stevens had been the director of films such as Swingtime (1936), Woman of the Year (1942), and The More the Merrier (1943). During World War II, as head of an Army film unit, he was present at the D-day invasion, the liberation of Paris, and the horrors of the Dachau concentration camp. After the war, he didn’t want to make musicals and comedies anymore. Much like John L. Sullivan, in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), he wanted to make serious films about the human condition.

With A Place in the Sun, Stevens may have thought he was making a social commentary on the class system in America or, perhaps, he was thinking about the moral ambiguity of whether or not we are guilty of the sins in our heart. All these years later, none of that really matters. For he was able to get Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, wondrously close together on that terrace, to say exactly those words. William C. Mellor used an unprecedented telephoto lens to get the intimate close-ups. William Hornbeck cut it and put it together never letting continuity interfere with emotion. And Franz Waxman enveloped it all in one of the most beautifully sublime pieces of music ever written for a motion picture. So now, all that matters is, by the grace of cinema, we have been left this moment, best described by the aforementioned guy with Liz and Monty tattooed on his bald head. Vikar says, “There’s hysteria in it.”

 © 2014 by James Clark

     Whereas (in Italy, in 1962) Anna Magnani would capitalize, on the leverage stemming from her indispensability, to hijack Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, for her own reasons, Katharine Hepburn would shape to her liking the 1940 film romance, The Philadelphia Story, to an outcome unsurprisingly very different from the former project—but, nevertheless, quite amazingly within the same galaxy where disinterestedness becomes palpably crucial. In 1939, Hepburn helped herself to her ex-boyfriend, Howard Hughes’ film rights to Philip Barry’s stage play, The Philadelphia Story (in which she starred); and, ever the shrewd media player, bought out her contract with RKO and signed on with MGM mogul, Louis B. Mayer, on condition that he finance her film property, starring herself (of course) along with a cast and production team of her devising, including her friend, director, George Cukor. Her coming, from out of such high-finance scheming, to navigate along a flight-path which Magnani broached with a wave of instinctive, emotive poetics, is one of the great enigmas of supposedly mainstream, Hollywood “entertainment.”

Though at the cusp of departing Depression-era escapism (in favor of World War whirlpools), The Philadelphia Story includes as high a sugar content as all those 1930s charmers reminding a shaken populace that life’s not so bad. Hepburn was far from a widely-beloved free spirit like Magnani, able to lucratively connect with a huge fan-base. In fact she had, at the period of her deft corporate grazing, become known as “box office poison.” Therefore, the dazzling coup of taking control of the movie version of that Broadway success would not fail to look like another People’s Choice. As guided by our star (a Bryn Mawr grad and member of a very rich family), there would be studio and locations enhancement of a precinct of the “idle [and blithely] rich” so seductive to film-going dreamers. With that format (operating like a Toyland for adults), there would be Barry’s motif of a seemingly spoiled-rotten young woman undergoing a zany life-lesson as she prepares for her imminent wedding. She transfers, with almost magical alacrity, from a very harsh critic of her father, her former husband, a team of publicity hounds, and her flaccid upper crust circle, to a seemingly dutiful bride now onstream to become what everyone loves (and pays to see in the movie theatre), namely, “a person with an understanding heart,” generous toward the little slips we all make. Hepburn’s literary friend, Philip Barry (apparently a devout Catholic with a sister who was a nun), would be something of a Pasolini, but with an affectionate flair for bringing into view those with mansions. That leaves us wondering if Hepburn (over and above her proving to be [like her folks] adept at rescuing a faltering franchise) would, like Magnani a few years later, see, amidst that predictable attraction, something else—something that has drawn her away from the comfortable trivia of her clan, to a life in performing arts. (Hepburn’s character, Tracy Lord, was briefly attached to a first husband [who, as it happens, becomes her second husband, as well], namely, Dexter Haven, who is on record as being a polo players and builder of a boat for his own use.)

Looking at the architecture of Barry’s quite charming little money machine, you can see how Hepburn could not only turn it into something quite different from the interests of the playwright and all those lovely customers who are always right; but do so, unlike Magnani with Mamma Roma, without having to overtly and annoyingly spoil someone’s day. Let’s approach the jolly melee, of what our star and entrepreneur and perhaps even auteur was able to have her way with getting onscreen, with a view to a couple of egregiously antiquated and crude harangues sent her way in the course of attempting to have her see the destruction she has occasioned. Her father comes home for the first time in years, to not only attend the wedding but brazen out his having left his wife in favor of a young dancer in New York (the setting being the Main Line manicured hinterland of Philadelphia). Tracy tears into him for having caused her mother distress and also for becoming the project of a scandal rag which, to prevent being published, forces her to allow her wedding to be photo-documented for the amusement (benign or otherwise) of “readers.” The crusty oligarch immediately shows a side of breathtaking oiliness, blaming her “coldness” for forcing him to seek in a young stranger the sense of youthfulness “the right kind of daughter” would have endowed him with. (Blazing all over this premise, of course, for anyone having departed the medieval era, is the question of what kind of affection Tracy would have had to provide in order to give Daddy what the bouncy young dancer was good at.) The stricken family man tells her, “You have everything but what it takes to be a human being, an understanding heart.” She, we may surmise, being very ardent about that matter (more, in fact, than about marriage and its run of romantic love), is noticeably overcome, her bite and sheen escaping her. (He also called her, in the course of his archaically presumptuous self-justification, “a prig and a perennial spinster… a married spinster…”) She mutters distractedly, “…I’m a kind of goddess? We’re the mighty?”

That vein whereby Tracy is assailed for lacking initiatives generally regarded as ladylike appears again in a rationale for alcoholism by Dexter (another uninvited and unwelcome guest). “You were no helpmate. You were a scold.” He snidely addresses her as “Red” (“You look in the pink, Red” (implying she’s become an abrasive, subversive fanatic). Then, his foot in the door in being until recently the Buenos Aries correspondent of that scandal sheet, Spy, and therewith able to facilitate the gambit to buy off the impulse of spotlighting her father by installing the wedding feature, he stages his bid for a comeback, first of all announcing his overcoming the addiction she supposedly drove him to. “Red, you could be the first woman on earth. But you’ll never amount to anything until you have some patience for human frailty.”

There is, of course, nothing, on the face of it, wrong with Dexter and Daddy’s sermons. Red is very much a “scold,” though a playful and witty one. (Her intended groom is a left-leaning self-made industrialist/would-be politician, up from the mines.) And the destabilization of her whole sensibility, its tuning forever going flat comprises a richly theatrical main thrust of conflictedness that in fact races amongst many of the players and (perhaps) constitutes a manifestation which culminates in Tracy’s not merely getting married but getting lucid. Finding the new groom would seem to be an intensification of all her well-known ruthlessness. (At the outset, her young sister remarks to her gentle, conciliatory mother, “She’s sort of hard, isn’t she? Stinky not to invite Father…” ; and even the always supportive lady has to admit, “Yes, Dear. I do think it’s stinky” [a poor excuse for tuning]. We first see her new beau, George Kittredge (a name emitting much prose and much less poetry), at the stables area of her family’s estate, where Tracy addresses him with light but pointed banter. “You look like something right out of a shop window.” She immediately goes on to wrestling him to the dusty terrain, in an instinctive effort to have him emit some earthy suppleness as against squeaky-clean, nouveau-riche self-promotion. George tells her when dusting himself off, “I used to dream about clean clothes when I worked in the mines. But now I’m getting fairly important [he owns a coal mine]—just luck, of course! What kind of publicity would we send out from this approach?” Tracy snaps back, “Not in my home!” He counters, “I thought it was our home…” And she hurries to say (the prospect of apt tone going down the drain), “Sorry, Darling! I mean very much our home…” After Kittredge’s taking an eternity to mount his horse, farcically, one of the three horse-savvy patricians along for the ride, calls out, “Hi ho, Silver! ( a neat, if slightly off-color quip within a time of vague foreboding). She had, before the peculiar corruption, yelled out, “Who’s that handsome man? Can Tracy pick ‘em or not?” Well, pretty soon, “not” is inescapable. Hard-working George’s being about to do some “progressive” politicking—she tells Dexter, who had averred, “He’s beneath you… in spirit,” “Already he’s a national figure”—casts some light on her getting mixed up with him due to sharing (at some level) hostility toward those fully devoted to material well-being. But the facile virtue spilling out amidst the horsey set here doesn’t reckon with Hepburn’s body language in showing Tracy’s joie de vivre glow which cuts across the imbroglio and leaves her virtually without a consort—a strange state of affairs for a wedding celebration of sublime romance, and pursuit from three self-assured admirers.

The third suitor, McColly Connor (“Mike”), comes aboard as the Spy Magazine writing wing of the two-winged hawk attack upon Tracy’s big day. His first reaction to the assignment is to bluster about such “Society Snoop” work as beneath him; then he jauntily invites (as told to his photographer/sidekick/girlfriend, Liz) dismissal—“I could start writing short stories again.” He quickly caves in when confronted by his boss and by starvation. Soon he’s joining Dexter and Daddy in dissing the bride as a heartless (and, not fully recognized as such, frightening) avatar of power. “The unapproachable Miss Lord—a Philadelphia Story. It’s degrading and undignified!” Having brought aboard Jimmy Stewart (to play Mike) in his genius for mawkish self-assertion, the project counts on his unbuttoned lip and heavily emotive attitude to not only iterate the problem of tuning but to open a front by which Tracy can regain a productive vantage point to replace the one obliterated by the anathematizing delivered by Daddy and Dexter. Even before the full bombardment, she proves to be alert to Mike’s occupancy (however shaky) of that art world nowhere to be seen on the Main Line. They bump into each other at the town library (which Dexter has to make clear as having been endowed by his grandfather)—he looking into background detail about the Lord family and she reading Mike’s one and only published book (which garnered all of $600.). She tells him, “I can’t make you out at all now. You talk so big and tough. But then you write like this… It’s quite an art…” On his pointing out that full-time poetics would be financial suicide for him, she offers him the use of her own residence tucked nearby amidst the verdant rolling countryside, which he is quick to praise. Then he demurs with, “I think patron Lady Bountifuls have more or less gone out.” On getting very drunk to antidote the opprobrium about her going around like a “high priestess,” she gravitates toward Mike, the loose cannon (unable to resist the estate’s house phone and announce to Tracy’s hapless Mom, “This is the Voice of Doom. Your days are numbered…”), and his emotive repertoire being the only kin in sight with a shot at what she regards as true. (Dexter has given her, for a wedding present, a model of the boat they once had, “The True Love;” that its outer range was a trip to Maine [a reminder of their Main Line bailiwick] raises questions about the compatibility of their sense of the “true.”)

At the pre-nuptials all-night party, she dances with Mike and they polish off some bottles of champagne, to the annoyance of George, clearly, even at this point, a groom who won’t be going down the aisle of domesticated predictability. The aftermath of this rediscovery of powerful earthiness finds her telling Mike, “It’s just that things I thought were important suddenly aren’t…” (Thus Dexter, shown in the opening scene [while still married to her] getting thrown out by her [for being less than dazzlingly graceful]—and in turn pushing her face and having her reel backward onto the floor and seeming to regard this as true to life, if not to love—gets back into the running in view of her now requiring only a trace [far from a ton] of playability from her interpersonal field. On that former fractious occasion she breaks one of his golf clubs over her knee.) Mike leaves the party to go over to Dexter’s to clear up some nagging confusions about where Tracy is coming from. Hiccupping, and babbling out maudlin platitudes—“Tracy’s no ordinary woman. When a girl is like Tracy she’s one in a million… She’s sort of like a queen, a radiant, glorious queen…” By contrast, Dexter is composed and goes on to pick the runoff of Mike’s brain, by means of which to contrive a way to lift the blackmail pertaining to Tracy’s dad’s fountain of youth that’s no one’s business but his own. Liz has driven the unconscious Tracy to Dexter’s driveway and on seeing her he puts his face close to hers and, with calm sincerity (Stewart’s shrillness paying off, by contrast), says, “You look beautiful, Red.” She informs him she doesn’t drink, Mike comes over, and she drives off with him, back to the party. Then, not only does their drinking resume, but she proposes, “Let’s have a quick swim to brighten things up.” Before they get there, Mike insists she can’t be serious about Kittredge, and she calls him an intellectual snob. “You live by your mind… The time to make up your mind about people is never… You’re a mass of prejudices… You’re a mass of brains and no feeling…” Mike joins in this pre-swim pool of consciousness by splashing back, “You’ve got all the prejudice…with all your class.” “What’s prejudice got to do with it?” is her making some sense while stumbling around. From out of this skirmish they suddenly embrace and deliver a passionate kiss. He asks, “It couldn’t be anything like love, could it?” She replies, “Oh we’re out of our mind! Put me in your pocket, Mike!”

The denouement threads this champagne-fuelled jet of romance (coming remarkably late to a narrative about a wedding) into: their finally having that quick swim; his carrying her back to the house—singing, dreadfully, the then recent fantasy movie song hit, “Somewhere over the Rainbow;” being met by a bemused Dexter and a livid George now on the patio; Tracy then brushing the obstacles aside by demanding, “Don’t stop, Mikey, Keep crooning!”; Dexter choosing to put a comedic, harmless spin on the event, Kittredge (declaring, “You don’t know women”) opting for tragedy (“All of you and your sophisticated ideas!”); Mike’s wrist watch turning up in her bedroom; Tracy’s being desolated by how far from correct behavior she’s fallen (fallen from her simple, now acknowledged to be simplistic, cover); her calling off the wedding to a resentful former hero (“You’re too good for me”/ “If that’s the way you want it… You and your whole rotten class! You’re on the way out! All of you!”); her saying to Mike, “Thanks, but no,” to his offer to come onstage as the new groom (crushing Liz, who soon recovers in the role of bench strength as they go forward to some kind of romance)–here Tracy tells Mike, “But I am beholden to you…”

Tracy waives her father’s offer to deliver a little speech to the “dearly beloved,” smoothing over the mishaps (something he does often and well); and instead she steps forward at the doorway to address the gathered blue-bloods. “There’s been a slight hitch in the proceedings,” she tells them. Then, desperately counting on smoothy Dexter on the other side of the door (Cary Grant, no less!) to seal the deal with those customers who could be testy, she’s prompted to finally offer them the wedding they were “cheated” from when she and Dexter eloped two years before. Like Goldilocks having found the repast that was “just right,” she puts herself into this scheme with great warmth and sparkle. Dexter borrows Tracy’s mother’s ring (only a prop anyway), Mike and Liz become Best Man and Maid of Honor and the squelched scandal publisher (Mike having made usable the latter’s being as compromised as the “sue me” Dad) snaps a photo of all of them at the altar. The frozen result of that moment has them all having lost that giddy topspin, looking, instead, like deer in the high-beams, a perfect depiction of the volatility of true love.

The optics of this subtly happy ending plays many trump cards. We’re even made to imagine Tracy’s parents getting back together. In the confusion when the Wedding March had already begun, and a different wedding was on tap, Tracy’s dad tells her, “You’re like a queen… like a goddess…” She grabs that cue to recite (with real feeling—ambiguity notwithstanding), “You know how I feel? Like a human being.” Dear old Dad then adds, “And you know how I feel? Proud.” Along the way he shows some lawyering skills—“I never said [you were a disappointment], daughter.” To which she measures out, “I don’t seem to be made of bronze.” His intended-to-be- charming rebuttal is: “No, you’re made of flesh and blood…”  (But then it’s pretty clear he always feels proud, even when ditching and surely hurting his wife to screw around. One of the points she makes in refusing Mike’s proposal is its being a source of hurting Liz [already a bit crushed by Mike’s ruthlessly disregarding her]. Another factor is inherent in her question, “Why has your mind taken hold again?” Tracy never articulates this factor of her hatred toward her father, perhaps at that earlier point [she having that extra house for the “hunting season”] regarding her mother as a born victim, lacking necessary incandescence and resilience. Now with some brand new ammo [thanks to Mike’s kick-start] she is truly Diana the Huntress, clipping along through erstwhile dizzying turbulence. Her very first remark, “How do you spell omelette?” speaks to a problem of synthesis. So does Dexter’s alert, to George: “She needs trouble to mature her… Give her lots of it.” Maybe she and Dexter will go all the way to Maine again on their boat, enjoying far from inconsequential riches of romance, however contrasting. The True Love she’s entered into would have a far more complex, solitary component, a component the happy viewers would not suspect.) The business deal here was to see her taken down a peg. (“You’re slipping, Red. I used to be afraid of that look.”) But careful viewing would see her climbing up a peg.

So it’s no more box office poison for Ms Hepburn, now so obviously close to her customers. Of course she was at the point of embarking on an unconventional romance with a nominally married, Spencer Tracy; but it was a well-hidden romance, never compromising her celebrity persona as a humanitarian hero. The DVD supplement to The Philadelphia Story features the star in later years, most personably discussing her career, largely passing it all off as due to having been since childhood a glutton for being in the spotlight. On coming to our movie here, though, she ever so carefully alludes to something else. “I know what makes Tracy tick!” Yes, she does; and the upshot of her discernment at white-hot levels is a surprisingly edgy little vehicle, possibly inspiring Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going.

By Jon Warner

There have been several films that follow an inanimate object (or animal) as it is transferred ownership to different people, with the meaning or importance of said object changing depending on the situation and the person involved. Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950) follows a Winchester rifle across several owners. Tales of Manhattan (1942) is a fascinating film involving several stories following a formal tailcoat. There’s also The Red Violin (1998). Even Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) and War Horse (2011) do something similar. Max Ophuls’ magnificent melodrama The Earrings of Madame de… seems to follow a similar pattern on the surface, as a pair of expensive earrings transfer owner several times. Ophuls’ film, though, seems to do something just a little different. It’s not really about following the earrings. In fact it is more about the motivations behind the giving and receiving of them than anything regarding chance transfer of ownership. Considering the monetary value of the earrings, no single person seems to give them a second thought until the earrings come full circle back to the original owner, as they are finally received as a gift of true love, becoming a glimmering example of both a failed marriage and an adulterous affair.

Max Ophuls wrote his screenplay along with Marcel Archard and Annette Wademant, based on the novel by Louise de Vilmorin. Their story concerns Louise (Danielle Darrieux) whom we meet at the beginning of the film as she is pawning her expensive earrings that her husband Andre (Charles Boyer) had bought for her, so she has money to pay off some debts. She feigns having lost the earrings, causing her husband to search for them. When a reward for the earrings appears in the newspaper, the pawnshop owner comes to the husband offering them back to him. He in turn, realizing how little his wife cared for them, gives them to his mistress Lola, who goes on a trip to Constantinople where she sells them. These earrings will return later to Louise after she begins a passionate affair with Baron Fabrizio Donati (played magnificently by Italian neo-realist director Vittorio De Sica) but the meaning placed upon the earrings changes significantly for Louise as she receives them as a gift for the second time in her life, with the affair throwing their lives for a loop.

This film as a whole is one of the true glories of melodramatic/romantic cinema. I find that the film really gets better as it goes along and you need to stick with it and really pay attention in order to follow it. While the opulence of the décor, the costumes, the cinematography, and the ripe, affair-ridden plot is rather overt, the film refrains from becoming soggy and actually flies by at rapid speed, never lingering too long anywhere but maintaining a mysterious and odd propulsion brought on through the dense scenes packed with images and movement often taking center stage over the dialogue. In fact, the dialogue almost eludes me at times as the performances are superbly underplayed, especially from Darrieux with a magnificent set of reserved emotions and controlled movements, She is indeed one of the most beautiful of screen actresses. I’ve seen relatively little of her work, but here and in other Ophuls films like La Ronde and Le Plaisir, she dominates her screen time and is simply transfixing. Charles Boyer as the aloof husband and De Sica as the ennobled lover also provide cool and purposely detached performances. What’s more, even the very words said in the film are reserved to the point of being almost anti-romantic or anti-conflict. Louise and Andre have an important marital discussion, but they engage each other from separate rooms in separate beds. And in the film’s most passionately intense moment, Louise coos to her lover Fabrizio, “I don’t love you. I don’t love you. I don’t love you”.

At distinctive opposition to the dialogue, Louise and Fabrizio’s affair is passionately reflected in the famously fluid and kinetic tracking shots employed throughout the film that are neither superfluous nor grandiloquent, particularly as we swirl around the ballroom during their dances where in fact the tracking shots serve to actualize the passion of Louise and Fabrizio through the smooth swaying and undulations. Ophuls seems to derive cinematic inspiration by juxtaposing the low-key dialogue with the resplendent visuals. Ophuls is one of my favorite romantic directors. He’s got a keen eye for visual passion and slow-burn sensuality. No more is this on display than in this film. In another magnificent and beautiful Ophuls touch, the set decoration often requires the camera to gaze longingly through curtains, windows or mirrors in order to view faces, as if the fragile nature of these characters’ lives must be protected from too much exposure. This is a film that really grows on you when watching it, and in the film’s final moments, you might find yourself extraordinarily moved by the tragic climax and rather surprised at the spell the film casts upon you. Ophuls’ careful balance of opulence and subtlety created his signature masterpiece and one of the most perfect melodramatic love stories ever made. Some may prefer Letter from an Unknown Woman, but for me, this film achieves a beautiful perfection.

by Joel Bocko

Lady and the Tramp is one of the great romances of all time…but it’s much more as well. In fact, the animated classic samples numerous mid-century film (and TV) genres. “Lady in Movieland” explores many of them while also observing Lady’s anxiety and eventual acceptance of a new member of the family (and what this means for her own comfort and independence). Hope you have as much fun watching this as I had making it.

You can also watch it on YouTube.

Screen cap from the most chilling scene in John Stahl’s 1945 masterpiece LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN.

by Sam Juliano

It all comes down to generous gulps of Poland Spring, extended refuges into air-conditioned rooms and mental countdown towards one’s planned vacation.  Some of course are already on those vacations – beaches and resort amusements are very much a part of the daily itinerary.  Summer can be one’s eternal joy, but it comes with some baggage, especially if your region is prone to exceedingly high temperatures.  Since most regions so apply, one is usually engaged in a love-hate relationship with the season.

The Romantic Countdown continues to inch forward to the halfway point.  The high quality of the writing is a constant joy for readers, many of whom have been troupers in the comment threads.

Many thanks to our guardian angel Dee Dee for her continued work in revising the site sidebar.  Coincidentally enough her posters for the just started Femme Noir Festival at the Film Forum are highlighting some of my own recent movie-going as Lucille, Sammy and I took in two double features that launched the venture on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon.  This past week we saw:

Life Itself    **** 1/2    (Wednesday night)  Montclair Bow-Tie

Mildred Pierce (1945)   *****  (Saturday night)  Film Forum

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) ****  (Sat)  Film Forum

Out of the Past (1947)   *****  (Sunday)         Film Forum

Leave Her to Heaven (1945)  **** 1/2  (Sunday)  Film Forum

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN features Gene Tierney in her Oscar-nominated role as a jealous woman who seeks to destroy all around her.  Leon Shamroy’s Technicolor cinematography is beautiful, and there’s a very fine score from Alfred Newman.  The lake scene, where a disabled teenager drowns is one of the most chilling scenes in all of cinema.  Martin Scorsese considers it one of the greatest films ever, and it’s hard to quarrel with that assessment.

MILDRED PIERCE won the Oscar in the same year Tierney was nominated, and it’s rightly her most celebrated performance.  She plays a hard-working mom with a monstrous daughter (Ann Blyth) who goes above and beyond in the name of treachery.  Great supporting performances, director, cinematography and score.

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE was superbly review here at WitD for the romantic countdown by John Greco.  It is certainly a very entertaining film as I found out once again over the weekend, but there are some issues.  Says Greco:

The final verdict? Well, the film is not the extraordinary classic some folks say it is. It is not up there with the two previously made films based on Cain novels, “Mildred Pierce” and Billy Wilder’s masterpiece “Double Indemnity.”  Of course, few films are on the same playing field as Wilder’s film.  That said, if you put aside the fact Lana Turner is just too stunning, too neat, too well lit, to be believable as a waitress at a pit stop diner, and ignore the unsatisfying un-noir like ending, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” remains a flawed though significant portrayal of ill-fated passion, and a ground breaking work in adult film entertainment.

OUT OF THE PAST (1947) is of course one of the greatest of all noirs.  Young Sammy liked it the best of the four films we saw.  I will defer to our very good friend and noir specialists John Grant for an excerpt here from his review that recently appeared at WitD during the still-running romantic film countdown:

Because that’s what characterizes Out of the Past, what makes it such an extraordinary offering: the way that everything is so well integrated, like a painting that perfectly satisfies the eye even though it’s hard to isolate which aspect is the one that appeals so much, the one that takes the painting from exquisite to masterpiece. Every time I watch Out of the Past I find it’s an even better movie than the one I recalled, and every time I realize that the real love story it tells us is not the one we always remember, about the passion-fueled infatuation that Jeff has for Kathie, and her exploitation of his blind obsession, but the tale of the deeply powerful love Jeff has for Ann—the love that sees him gladly give up his life to protect her.

LIFE ITSELF – the documentary on the life and career of Roger Ebert is deeply moving and a larger-than-life portrait of the man who eventually became America’s most beloved film critic.  It was heartbreaking to watch the man succumb to the cancer that forced the removal of his lower jaw –  yet everyone watching the film would be inspired by his staying the course professionally and of the undying devotion of his wife Chaz.  Well well directed by documentarian Steve James.

Film noir treasure OUT OF THE PAST (1947)

Screen cap from MILDRED PIERCE (1945)