Bert n Jerry

 

Bernardo Bertolucci, director of PARTNER, and Jerry Lewis, star of PARDNERS, share a birthday.

And it is today! Happy birthday Bert ‘n’ Jer!

Suggested celebratory Fever Dream Double Feature: LITTLE BUDDHA and THE GEISHA BOY.

Danger: Otto at work

“Otto had the sense of humour of a guillotine.” ~ Vincent Price.

In this age of high oddness — more things are available to see on home video than ever before, but not necessarily the RIGHT THINGS — it is particularly odd that Otto Preminger’s second Hollywood feature, DANGER, LOVE AT WORK, should be available from the BFI on DVD. Why not his first feature? Why not his only pre-Hollywood film? They might be completely negligible (Otto thought so), but then, so is this.

My dog-eared copy of Halliwell’s Film Guide calls the film “not inconsiderable”, which might be true, but I would go so far as to actually call it “considerable” either. Halliwell then compares the film to YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU, which is bang on the money (something that can rarely be said for the once ubiquitous Leslie H, a steaming middlebrow who didn’t love anything made after 196 — both films try to create comedy out of an excess of eccentricity. Both have dated badly and can irritate more than they amuse.

Preminger claimed that studio head Darryl Zanuck, having handed him the project, tried to foist Simone Simon upon the director as leading lady. OP protested that with SS’s scanty command of English she would be unable to cope with the current fashion for fast-talking screwball dialogue, and he claims that after a couple of days filming he was proved right. Simone was sent packing, only making her real mark in American movies a few years later at RKO.

I find it hard to believe that Zanuck would cast Simon as the daughter of a family of wealthy American eccentrics. How would he get around her obvious ooh-la-la? Some studio bosses may have been stupid, but Zanuck wasn’t one of them. Preminger tells this story in Gerald Pratley’s critical study of the director (mostly a bunch of Otto anecdotes), again in his ottobiography, and it’s repeated in Willi Frischauer’s unauthorised bio (mostly a bunch of suspiciously similar Otto anecdotes), but I’d love to hear the Zanuck version, or better yet, an account by a neutral third party.

Anyhow, Ann Sothern landed the part, and she’s the most appealing feature of the film, sexy and zesty and doing a bit of a Katherine Hepburn impersonation but not so’s it gets annoying.

 

Preminger further claims that Zanuck LOVED what he did with the film, and this is harder still to accept, since it’s conspicuously UNamusing for a comedy of this period (it’s pretty hard to find dull studio comedies of this era, though they do exist). The film also lacks much of Preminger’s flowing visual style, tending to cut into closer views whenever it threatens to get any visual momentum going. The exception is a nice shot that follows Jack Haley and Ann Sothern out of a bedroom, along a looong landing and down a staircase, which also serves as build-up to Edward Everett Horton’s entrance.

Horton (see B. Kite’s splendid profile in The Believer: “Edward Everett, are you gay?”) is another of the film’s delights, cast flamboyantly against type as a notoriously “masterful” he-man. As interpreted by EEH, this character is a mass of neurotic tics, obviously living a lie: HE knows he’s not masterful, and he expects at any instant to be rumbled by all and sundry, and so he strides around in a perpetual tizzy at the thought of his imminent shaming. A joy.

Jack Haley is a weak spot as leading hombre. With the appearance of a cherub gone to seed, he apparently thinks he’s CUTE. Fiona didn’t recognise the Tin Man without his lead-based face paint. He proves to be one of those select unfortunate actors who only really works when he’s wearing a funnel on his head. Richard Gere is another.

Fiona: “I don’t recall Richard Gere ever wearing a funnel on his head.”

Me: “He never had. But BOY does he need one.”

Also troublesome: John Carradine as Hollywood’s idea of a modern artist. One enjoys the Carradine presence, of course — a cadaver jerked about by invisible wires — but the loony modern artist is a tiresome comic trope. Then there’s the irritating kid — the problem here is that most Hollywood kids are already irksome without seeming to try (well, they DO try, awfully hard, but to be sweet and moppet-like rather than irksome), so an annoying little professional who’s actually an ass-pain ON PURPOSE is more than can be stood without anaesthetic.

What I’m really complaining about is an accumulation of bits of zaniness, that tiresome substitute for the genuinely surprising. In a zany context, almost nothing is surprising except shock brutality (Jack Haley savagely kicking the little boy into a mud puddle isn’t funny exactly, but it’s a welcome change of tone). And surprise is lifesblood to comedy.

But but but — Preminger was not totally without comedy props. His two Lubitsch-related films are hard to see, but I did manage to get my mitts on a VHS off-air recording of A ROYAL SCANDAL, made under the Great Ernst’s supervision (the other “collaboration”, THAT LADY IN ERMINE, was developed by Lubitsch then taken over by Otto after the maestro was struck down by post-coital heart attack). The film has just gotten a BFI DVD release.

And it’s pretty good! While most attention has focused on the film being unusually weak for a Lubitsch comedy, one could as well say that it’s unusually funny for a Preminger comedy. And it has Charles “Piggy-Wiggy”Coburn, who can’t NOT be funny unless seriously handicapped. The script seems to get wittier when he’s around, possibly because he’s playing a Macchiavellian rogue politician and that’s something both Lubitsch and Preminger can get a kick out of. Vincent Price is enjoyable as ever and in the lead, Tallulah Bankhead is a great Catherine the Great.

William Eythe is the weak spot here — his timing is impeccable (EVERYBODY’S timing is impeccable when Lubitsch is lurking by, he mines comedy from the unlikeliest people) but he lacks charisma, and even in a tight white uniform he doesn’t really have what it takes to explain Tallulah’s lust for him. But he does get the best gag in the film…

Tallulah has laid her cards on the table — she hasn’t laid William but she’s declared she wants to. He steps away from the divan where she reclines and retreats to the wall. Pensive, abstracted in deep thought, he paces the room. For a long time he paces. Preminger’s camera follows him in one of those long, elegant tracks. Then — double take! he paces right into Tallulah, who has left her divan, unseen by us and him, to stand patiently in his path and wait for him to pace into her velvety clutches.

It doesn’t sound much, but it’s an elegant joke on the camera’s ability to be fooled, during a long take, if things don’t stay still. It marks the point in the film where Lubitsch’s wit and Preminger’s rather different pure style come together for one glorious moment.

Otto eroticism

 

Going by these frame grabs, you might think Preminger’s second Ho’wood flick, DANGER: LOVE AT WORK was much more sexual than his controversial ’50s sex comedy THE MOON IS BLUE, a film which shattered the Hays Code’s authority over the movie industry but which is pretty tame (the use of phrases like “professional virgin” and “pregnant” is what caused the controv.) By contrast, the following out-of-context images are HOT STUFF and should probably not be viewed by anybody under the age of, oh, 34.

The stained digits of Edward Everett Horton. How’s THAT for polymorphous perversity? I shall pass over the next two images in silence:

Alas, I think these particular shots give a somewhat false idea of how sexual (and funny) the film is. More on it later.

Look out Richard Gere!

Deadly Friend

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/03/13/hilton.movie/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

Filmmaker and pal-o-mine Mark Bender, last spotted leaping from a third floor window in a dream I had last week (the actual waking-Mark is almost crazy enough to do something like that), emails to inform me of a startling development in his movie career.

“Check out this link to a story that ran yesterday on CNN here!

It is probably the weirdest thing we will ever here about my late great cinematic masterpiece: DEADLY RUN.

Wow, this freaked my mind!” 

As well it might. DEADLY RUN, I’m sure Mark won’t mind me telling you, is a rather poor MOST DANGEROUS GAME rip-off, about a serial killer who abducts women, then hunts them in the woods. Mark was recruited to direct this straight-to-DVD blecch-buster by its financier/star, a weightlifter with delusions of talent who somehow was not quite crazy enough to think he could direct it himself, but who settled for preventing Mark from doing his job and refusing to follow any directions.

(Mark’s Big Suggestion was that the killer should hunt his victims while naked, painted red and wearing ANTLERS, which the muscleman refused to do. I kind of understand his reluctance, but Mark’s point was that this would have made for an unforgettable image to grace the video sleeve. Which is true.)

With its slightly unfocused script and sometimes amateurish cast (the only scary thing about the film’s killer is that he CHOSE to give the performance he does), the film doesn’t stand any chance of being good, but lest you blame Mark for this, you should check out the climax, which was re-shot behind his back by another director. Suddenly elementary continuity is suspended and the killer is TELEPORTING around by the magic of Bad Editing. This is maybe the most entertaining part because it’s solidly in the so-bad-its-good camp, with all traces of Mark’s professional touch ruthlessly expunged.

And now comes the news that the producer, a criminal lawyer, was taking script advice (the script is credited to one Joe Gillis, which is the name of William Holden’s screenwriter character in SUNSET BOULEVARD) from a guy who turns out to be a real-life killer a lot like the one in the movie. Which is the LEAST funny thing about this film, although arguably the closest it gets to dramatic irony.

“He was a criminal,” Rael said. “And he’d be the first to admit it. He might have been a sociopath, but he was a happy one and an animated one. One who, quite frankly, I never would have thought in a million years. … Well, he had criminal instincts, but he was not a violent person. I was wrong about that.”

The alternative is that the killer’s connection to the film is being exaggerated by the producer, in an attempt to shift a few more units, which would be beyond-belief sleazy, but not necessarily incredible from a guy who is both a B-movie producer and a lawyer…

 

I pressed Mark for a comment on all this.

“I think this is so weird and disturbing that I am freaked out! Man, my life gets weirder every blooming day!”

At any rate, I hope we aren’t going to get people claiming Gary Michael Hilton was turned into a killer by the corrupting experience of seeing the movie he helped write. This is actually more evidence for the opposite cause-and-effect argument, that rather than being turned into killers by violent movies, killers and other crumbs just like violent movies because that’s the kind of shit they’re into.