While I wait for David Ehrenstein’s euphoric nomination to appear on Youtube, I’m jumping ahead to present my partner Fiona Watson’s feelgood film footage. She considered a variety of candidates, many of which Mr. Ehrenstein would approve of, I’m sure: Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor’s rendition of Moses Supposes from SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN; Anne Miller dancing to Too Darn Hot in KISS ME KATE or Prehistoric Man in ON THE TOWN; the Marx Brothers going to war in DUCK SOUP (the scene that cures Woody Allen of depression in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS). It’s interesting how musical numbers tend to dominate the field of Cinema Euphoria. Maybe that’s why, in these troublous times, the musical is making a comeback, albeit frequently in a half-arsed fashion (Fiona: “Watching MOULIN ROUGE is like having your eyes pinned open, like the Ludovico Treatment, while someone throws glitter in them, for two hours”).
Anyhow, I was carefully monitoring Fiona’s joy-levels as she watched the clips, and the clear winner was this one:
You probably all know it, but it’s an interesting one nonetheless. Bear in mind, this isn’t about the best cinema, merely the most bliss-inducing, and that’s clearly not the same thing — but this is still a magnificent sequence. The animation of the apes is impressive, they have real weight and substance and meat on their bones, and real bones too. Unlike Jessica Rabbit they aren’t unstructured plastic excrescences, and unlike the Little Mermaid their features don’t float, unmoored, on their faces, like flotsam.
Then there’s the song. The Sherman Brothers had a few years of being able to do no wrong, with fantastic work in THE JUNGLE BOOK, CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG and MARY POPPINS. Go listen if you don’t believe me. “Me Ole Bamboo” from CCBB is the song all of Scotland will be dancing to tonight.
Fiona and I both groove equally to the scat singing and the more coherent, yet still non sequiteur-ish interjections like “Take me home, daddy!” That always cracks me up. And the words “Not yet Balloo!” have an iconic resonance in our household.
What’s also cool is that when Fiona first saw this, as a tiny tot, she didn’t like it, was seriously freaked out by it, in fact. “I don’t like the monkey! Why are his arms so long?” she cried as she was manoevred from the auditorium. It’s one of the nice things about growing up, we can appreciate the appeal of a singing oran-outan without experiencing the primal terror than initially accompanies his every movement.
And if that’s not something to feel euphoric about, I don’t know what is.
(Euphoria #3 should be along sometime early in the new year)
I’ve long been interested in the use of signs in Orson Welles’ work. I don’t mean symbolism, I mean literal signposts, like the one which begins and ends his very first feature, CITIZEN KANE. A warning to keep out, which is immediately disobeyed by Greg Toland’s camera, which simply cranes up and over the fence, allowing editor Robert Wise to dissolve us ever closer to the forbidden dream palace of Xanadu.
Theory: Welles’ anarchic side is going to make him want to disobey or poke fun at shouty authoritarian signs whenever he can. Let’s see if there’s any basis for this.
DON’T TOUCH THE AXE
At 8.36 into this clip from Welles’ THE STRANGER there’s a modest bit of signage: “KEEP THIS SPACE CLEAR FIRE EQUIPMENT.” Not particularly ironic, although the fugitive Nazi immediately violates the spirit of the fire equipment by trying to grab the axe to murder his pursuer. He’s unable to get ahold of it, suggesting that the fire equipment is noty properly maintained. (I remember a list of movie clichés pointing out that fire extinguishers etc are never used for their proper purpose in films.)
But just moments later, 9.29 in the same clip, is a humdinger. After braining Edward G Robinson with a piece of gymnasiana (I don’t know the technical term for it), the nasty Nazi departs through a Big Door which carries a Big Sign: “ANYONE USING APPARATUS IN THIS ROOM - DOES SO AT THEIR OWN RISK Coach Raskie”. The sign is enormous– obviously Welles really wanted us to get this joke. Sadly we never get to meet this Coach Raskie fellow, a man who, despite his highly developed physique, lives in mortal fear of disgruntled clientele suing him for damages in respect of accidental injuries inflicted with barbells, vaulting-horses and medicine balls.
In LADY FROM SHANGHAI there’s a different kind of sign in the Crazy House sequence, truncated by Columbia Pictures but still enthralling. Giant placards reading STAND UP OR GIVE UP confront Welles as he staggers through the distorted sets and spinning rooms — but though the signs dwarf our protag, he is unable to obey them, as the floor keeps sliding from under his feet. Rather than defying the sign, he would like to follow its advice, but the sign is part of a structure which makes such compliance impossible. This is almost a perfect analogy for the world of film noir, where society imposes firm laws, and strict penalties for breaking them, but seems to make lawful existence difficult by rewarding crime more richly than virtue, and putting temptation in everybody’s path.
FRAMED
In TOUCH OF EVIL there’s another example of a sign Welles, or somebody in the edit, was obviously anxious for us not to miss. As Sheriff Hank Quinlan (Welles) departs the sleazy neon-lit hotel room where he’s throttled Akim Tamiroff, drunkenly leaving behind a piece of incriminating evidence, his walking stick. Some commentators have delighted in the perceived pun: Welles is destroyed by his cane / KANE. I think this is a bit too contrived (and I doubt Welles saw KANE that way), and it misses the more filmic joke, the sign on the hotel room door advising guests not to leave anything behind in the room. As Welles shuts the door behind him, an optical zoom and brief freeze-frame make sure we have time to read the warning Quinlan ignores.
Another cute bit of signage, earlier in the same film, is this baby:
This one is sort of just quirky scene-setting, in a way. The film abounds with odd details of production design and alluring, decayed textures. But maybe there’s more to be read into it: Chuck Heston is on the phone to his young bride, Janet Leigh, who lies sprawled in pneumatic ‘fifties lingerie in one of her unlucky motels, just at the other end of that phone line. Perhaps Heston is the blind one, blind to her charms, since he can’t see her, and blind to the danger she’s in, since he’s mostly several steps behind Welles’ Sheriff Quinlan. It’s worth recalling, perhaps, that Welles himself hated the telephone, and this may be an attack on that Infernal Contraption: to communicate by Bell’s invention is to render oneself blind.
Just as we can divide the Welles films neatly into those with gunshots and those with snow (only MR ARKADIN has both), we can also find films with signs and films without any writing at all, typically the period films. MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS is largely sign-free, and even the credits are spoken by Welles rather than printed. This is carried on in at least one version of OTHELLO and also in the end titles of THE TRIAL, a film set in no particular country, where the presence of any kind of printed matter would be an intrusion, despite all those typewriters clacking away in Joseph K’s giant open-plan office.
F FOR FAKE gives us a series of title cards shrieking FAKE! at us, as well as a pile of film cans with lettering inked across the camera tape sealing the negative in. A stab at a title, ABOUT FAKES, is writted on the top of one can (another misleading sign, since that’s not the name this film generally goes by), and the producer’s credit is signed on a canvas, an ambiguous gesture in a film much concerned with forged signatures.
Illuminated signs, billboards and theatrical posters are perhaps best saved for a separate thread…
Stills from THE FINAL PROGRAMME, an amazing pop-sci-fi sextravaganza scripted, directed and designed by the enormous Robert Fuest. Here we see dashing, pill-popping Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Jerry Cornelius (bottom) played by Jon Finch (who deserves rediscovery for being sexy and brilliant here) in search of mad scientists Graham Crowden (also to be seen maddening up Lindsay Anderson’s Mick Travis trilogy), Basil Henson and George Coulouris (the only member of the cast in CITIZEN KANE who aged something like his character. More on Prophetic Cinema, and the noble Mr. Crowden, soon).
For a while Fuest was a bright-yet-unrecognised light of British Cinema, but he had the bad luck to come along during the collapse in American funding at the start of the seventies. Initially encouraged, then royally shafted, by what Michael Reeves called “those ponces at A.I.P.”, Fuest combined eye-popping visual flair, a traditionally English love for the eccentric and unruly, and a gleeful sadism. In other words, he was a Michael Powell for the rock ‘n’ roll era.
While Michael Reeves was destroyed by depression, recreational drugs, and psychiatry, Fuest was trashed by the film business itself: THE DEVIL’S RAIN was ludicrously recut by the A.I.P. and the industry in the U.K. imploded, leaving Fuest to mostly stifle in TV work, with only one other feature credit in 1982, an intriguing-sounding softcore drama, APHRODITE.
But before that happened, we get not only the above movie, on which more later, but also the two DR PHIBES comedy-horrors with Vincent Price (a third, PHIBES TRIUMPHANT, was stymied by Fuest’s inability to come up with any more elaborately nasty murders), a sombre, skilled and stylish WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and this location-set, brightly daylit psycho-thriller, AND SOON THE DARKNESS (an odd debut for a former production designer since it requires no sets!):
I like the whispery female VO that comes in partway thru, as if someone’s been watching Godard…
In David Cronenberg’s EASTERN PROMISES, Viggo Mortensen* urinates hard on a gravestone. Wish I could remember the name carved on the stone so I could Google it. I mean, what an unmissable opportunity! I’m sure the cemetery people (cemetarians?) wouldn’t allow an actor to pass water over a real Last Resting Place, so the stone must’ve been knocked up specially, in which case somebody got to choose the name inscribed on it, and who could resist making that name at least a close facsimile to an ex-wife’s, a movie critic’s, an unsympathetic producer’s or a school bully’s?
Wish I knew which. Two obvious possibilities, Robin Wood, once Canada’s premier writer-on-film, who never liked Cronenberg’s stuff, and the producers of Cronenberg’s dull drag racing movie, FAST COMPANY, can be excluded. Because it’s not their name. I don’t recollect exactly what the name IS, but I didn’t recognise it. Anybody out there with an Academy screener who can check?
New Year’s resolution: get my mind out of the sewer.
*Regular reader Elver Loho points out that it’s not Viggo who does this at all, but another character. So this post is even more fatuous than we already believed…
Thanks for the suggestions I’ve already had for future editions of Cinema Euphoria. I’ll get to them over the coming weeks. Here’s my own first nomination.
I’ve written before about my love of William Wyler’s work. Here’s an offshoot of it, a piece of informal, or unofficial cinema that gives me great pleasure whenever I see it.
Audrey Hepburn’s screen test:
Partly it’s the human thing of responding to a smile with a smile. But what I like most is…
Wyler told Thorold Dickinson, who was shooting this test, to let the cameras roll on after the test was supposed to be over, and just talk to Hepburn, to get an unaffected, natural look at her. Audrey at first is quite stiff — like most intelligent kids, she tries to make a good impression by being Very Serious. And she’s probably getting further and further from landing the part the more that goes on. Then an emotive memory surfaces, and she appears vulnerable, and I would think Wyler’s interest would perk up at that point. And then, at the end, the grown-up asks a silly question and like all smart kids Audrey can’t help laughing at the silly grown-up, and also delights in having got one over on the Germans. And that smile has to be the moment when she got the part.
It might be interesting to blog on a few more examples of informal cinema, stuff that isn’t quite a film, but isn’t anything else. I have a newsreel I’d like to show you all, for instance. And suggestions are, as always, gratefully received.
Regular reader B. Kite suggested I blog about euphoric scenes, little film moments that induce detectable amounts of happiness in the viewer. He nominates the clip below, and it’s a good one! The real bliss starts about four and a half minutes in.
“something abt this number just makes me incredibly happy. as well as a beautiful arrangement of a great song (the first!), it’s the FACES”
Reminds me of Kubrick’s nice line about the last shot of THE SHINING: “Every face around Jack is an archetype of the period.”
Boy, if we could actually reincarnate in a Fred Astaire movie, just by freezing to death in a maze, who among us would have the courage to resist? It’s a very real problem.
Mr. K goes on:
“If I were going to nominate the greatest moments in movies, this wdn’t be in my top choices, but if we’re talking abt little moments that just make one v. happy…”
I propose to run a SERIES of such posts, with scenes nominated by YOU, the Shadowplayers, all you wonderful people out there in the dark! Send me links or just describe the scene you have in mind and I’ll try to get ahold of it (and Chris, no porn).
If, as David Lynch believes, we could solve all the world’s problems by getting the square root of the Earth’s population to transcendentally meditate at the same time — “And bango!” — then imagine what we could achieve if all the readers of this blog, the many millions, clicked on Fred Astaire at the same time. Let’s unroll some euphoria!
I’ll go next, to keep the ball rolling, but please, EVERYBODY, give me your thoughts.
(Oh, the film clip is from DAMSEL IN DISTRESS, directed by George Stevens — whom BK still doesn’t accept as a Great American Filmmaker, despite loving Stevens’ Astaire films — and it’s based on a story by the sublime P.G. Wodehouse, and features Joan Fontaine and Burns and Allen.)
This is basically me experimenting with Photobucket and frame grabs!
These images are from Jose Larraz’s VAMPYRES. I always found the horrible sexy vampires in it a bit too “Penthouse Pets” to be really terrifying, but the autumnal English countryside shots, photographed by the distinguished Harry Waxman (BRIGHTON ROCK, ENDLESS NIGHT) are stunning, and juxtapose effectively with the scenes of blood-smeared naked chicks getting it on, 70s-style (unconvincing softcore frottage).
The misty 70s vibe makes me think of another film from this time and place:
Which leads me irresistibly to this defining image of the times:
Above is a very rare clip featuring director Mitchell Leisen (and star W.C. Fields). The only other footage of Leisen I know of is the start of HOLD BACK THE DAWN, where Leisen plays, basically, himself, a top Hollywood director making a wartime romance with Brian Donlevy and Veronica Lake (I WANTED WINGS, a real Leisen film from the same year, 1941).
Leisen has been either ignored or devalued for too long. Billy Wilder, who didn’t much enjoy writing for the director, spent fifty years denigrating Leisen at every opportunity (”I don’t knock fairies. Let him be a fairy. Leisen’s problem was he was a stupid fairy,” gives you the tone of the debate). The legend grew that Wilder was compelled to become a director because Leisen mutilated his scripts. But the films he co-scripted for “Mitch”, MIDNIGHT and HOLD BACK THE DAWN, and at least the first half of ARISE, MY LOVE, are far stronger films than Wilder’s first couple of Hollywood movies as director, THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR and 5 GRAVES TO CAIRO. Both filmmakers made great films, and a good Leisen film is clearly better than a middling Wilder film.
There’s a resurgence in Leisen’s reputation now, with retrospectives in recent years at San Sebastian and Edinburgh. Leisen is finally on the rise, and this may actually lead to a slight downgrading of Wilder’s standing, although I would expect that films like SOME LIKE IT HOT and THE APARTMENT have a secure place in film-lovers’ affections that cannot be dented.
The reason Leisen’s rise might bring about a dip for Wilder is found in one film, SWING HIGH, SWING LOW, from 1937. Fred MacMurray plays Skid Johnson, a trumpet player with an alcohol problem. The film details his affair with Carole Lombard’s Maggie King, a singer (Lombard and MacMurray had already starred together in Leisen’s HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE two years earlier). There’s a scene later in the film where Skid hits the skids, raggedly walking the real streets of New York and pawning his trumpet to buy more drink. This may surprise anybody who bought the line that Billy Wilder’s THE LOST WEEKEND, seven years later, was the first talkie to take alcoholism seriously. The sequence in that film where Ray Milland goes to pawn his typewriter closely echoes Leisen’s earlier movie.
That would be of only minor interest if SH,SL were a minor film, but it’s a rich and fascinating work that easily stands up to Wilder’s more celebrated film. Starting as a romantic comedy about bohemian musicians in Panama (with a hypochondriac pianist friend, a wisecracking older broad, and a pet chicken), it slides, without us noticing, into romantic tragedy, as MacMurray Makes it Big in the Big Apple, is seduced away from Lombard by an impossibly sultry young Dorothy Lamour, lets success go to his head and falls from grace as the booze goes to his liver. All this happens over the course of a substantial two-hour running time, allowing us a rare feeling of nostalgia for the early, happy part of the film, when the characters were poor and struggling but hopeful. It’s like the contrast between the two parts of LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS.
Leisen was a marvel at managing these tonal shifts: REMEMBER THE NIGHT, scripted by Preston Sturges, flips from urban screwball comedy to bucolic sentimentality, slipping smoothly into romantic tragedy at the end, with a couple of other detours on the way — Barbara Stanwyck’s mother lives in a Gothic noir house and extinguishes the only lantern when her daughter leaves: to use a great line from Bruce Robinson, she lives “mainly in the dark, like a tongue.”
Similarly, nifty rom-com HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE features a moody, low-key nocturne in its second act, with low key-lighting, much pensive cigarette smoke, unresolved sexual tension, and an early example of the psychological track-in, as Leisen glides towards Fred MacMurray (his favourite leading man), creating a slowly mounting romantic tension. This kind of camera movement probably originates with Murnau, but is otherwise not much seen until the ‘forties, and rarely then. It became a bit of a tic with Spielberg in the ‘eighties, and was hyped up to new levels by Sam Raimi, who uses it almost musically.
Leisen presents a modest challenge to auteurist critics because his work is disparate, crossing genres and tones, often in the same film. But the same can be said of even as consistent a filmmaker as Hawks. Leisen’s best work falls into three main categories:
1) Melodrama. Leisen’s “women’s pictures” include TO EACH HIS OWN (winning an Oscar for Olivia DeHavilland), a tear-jerker about a girl who, separated from her illigitmate child, struggles for years to win him back. Charles Brackett’s script (unlike his partner Wilder, Brackett had no problem working with Leisen again) leavens the intense sentiment with bitter elements, as DeHavilland tries to take her son back by blackmailing his adoptive parents. Leisen managed to persuade the censors to allow the use of the word “bastard” in its technically correct sense, then dropped it when Olivia couldn’t say the line without laughing. This willingness to change dialogue on the floor is what pissed Wilder off.
2) Comedy. Leisen’s work includes oddities like THE BIG BROADCAST OF 1937, but it is in romantic comedies like EASY LIVING (scripted by Sturges) and MIDNIGHT (Wilder and Brackett) that he showcases his skill with light comedy, broad comedy, and elegant design and filming (Leisen began as costume designer and then production designer on DeMille’s THE SIGN OF THE CROSS and Walsh’s THIEF OF BAGDAD).
EASY LIVING features the world’s most beautiful automat, scene of an escalating slapstick food fight that gave employment to every pratfall specialist in Tinseltown, as well as Jean Arthur in an accidentally acquired fur coat (”Kismet!”) causing a run on the stock exchange despite a complete innocence of financial matters.
3) Camp. Which of course can combine elements of 1) and 2), but in Leisen’s case also introduces historical and musical elements. MURDER AT THE VANITIES is a boisterous backstage mystery with ludicrous, gorgeous musical numbers, such as “Marijuana”, in which a cactus-like pot plant sprouts naked girls. The song is interrupted by a screaming showgirl as blood drips from the rafters onto her bare bosom*, which should give you some idea.
Although Leisen’s oevre crosses genre boundaries, sometimes in the same film, he does have themes and motifs that spring up again and again: psychoanalysis (Leisen was an ardant devoteeof the couch); Mexico and Central America; gay characters (Richard Hayden in NO TIME FOR LOVE is the rom-com’s best-ever Gay Best Friend); impostures (especially in the comedies, Shakespeare-style, but NO MAN OF HER OWN, Leisen’s sole noir, uses the device for suspense and pathos); abrupt mood swings (see above); elaborate design of sets and costumes (a virtue with which the director has often been beaten by homophobic Wilderists); love stories in which one lover is virtuous, the other shiftless or untrustworthy (this may have had an autobiographical component).
David Melville’s Great Directors essay, online at Senses of Cinema (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/05/leisen.html), should be your first port of call for more information and analysis (after the films themselves, slowly becoming available on DVD).
David Chierichetti’s HOLLYWOOD DIRECTOR, available secondhand, is an interview book and critical study: Leisen, retired and in ill-health, cooperated fully, hoping to salvage his reputation. Maybe it’s finally working.
*According to psychologists advising the British Board of Film Censors, the sight of blood on breasts acts as a Rape Trigger in some male viewers, but the intended audience of MURDER AT THE VANITIES is perhaps immune to such auto-suggestion.
If you want to be a 1970s filmmaker — and who doesn’t? — you should try and pick up a secondhand copy of MOVIE PEOPLE, edited by Fred Baker with Ross Firestone. And grow a beard.
The book is a sparky collection of interviews with snazzy personae from the U.S. film biz, and serves as a neat primer on How to Talk 70s. Here’s Mr. Cool, Quincy Jones:
‘I’m very wary of the cat who says “I do my thing and zap/zap/zap/zap/zap — it’s great!” If he doesn’t bleed a little, something’s off. I know Ingmar Bergman is supposed to knock out his pictures in two or three weeks, but I’m sure that underneath he chews up twenty tons of rug. He won’t even leave his own city, so don’t tell me what a real secure cat he is. He’s as uptight and sensitive as anybody else. You’ve got to be to care that much.’
Then they ask Terry Southern (the man who actually wrote the bits of EASY RIDER that required writing):
Could you be more specific regarding these negative experiences you’ve had as a screenwriter?
TS: ‘I could of course be devastatingly specific about it, but this would plunge us into the grotesque realm of badmouthery and personalities — whereas it is probably much more to the purposes of your project if we can somehow restrict it to the technical and practical aspects of screenwriting. I mentioned the negative side only because it would be misleading not to. Suffice it to say that with the exception of STRANGELOVE, of the films I’ve worked on there isn’t one that would not be infinitely improved by the absence of the director.’
As a director, and fainthearted auteurist (Orson Welles: “A good film can be made by anybody. Great films are made by the director.”) I always take a perverse pleasure in director-bashing. It’s worth bearing in mind that truly bad films that started as good scripts are also made by the director, or else the producer. Fish stinks from the head.
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FILM, MUSIC, literature | Tagged: Ann Miller, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Disney, Duck Soup, Fiona Watson, Gene Kelly, Kipling, Louis Prima, Marx Brothers, MGM, Sherman Brothers, Stanley Donen, The Jungle Book, Woody Allen | 
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