The other one.

THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT — again!

Raoul Walsh’s 1940 classic may offer less reading material than it’s same-name British counterpart, but it’s a superior film. I’d never seen it — Walsh is one of those directors it’s taken me a ridiculously long time to get around to. I did see WHITE HEAT as a kid, and it upset me — as it should. A few others along the way, but only in the last few years have I started seeking his stuff out.

One could be pretty brutal about 30s British cinema by contrasting Arthur Woods’ film with Walsh’s. Walsh has unfair advantages, of course: a bigger budget, the studio apparatus, and access to genuine movie stars. And what stars! More on them in a moment.

Both films have an admirable interest in carving exciting drama from working class life, but unfortunately both do so by shoehorning in murder stories that aren’t especially germane to the lifestyle portrayed. A movie like Dassin’s THIEVES’ HIGHWAY does the hard-boiled trucking thing far better by basing its whole story around the conflicts and crimes that can arise naturally from the milieu – that movie only goes wrong with its Hollywood ending. Dassin’s screenwriter, A.I. Bezzerides (amazing list of credits!) wrote the source novel for Walsh’s film, and even without having read it I can guess where the adaptation starts to seriously stray. Walsh’s film scores in the first half by concentrating on the work angle. It’s when a PLOT is injected, too late and not carefully enough, that his film crosses the meridian line and finds itself in trouble.

That first half, pairing George Raft in the lead (short, mellow and understated, oddly likable) with Humphrey Bogart as his brother (just before Raft handed Bogie the leading man roles that made him a real star, by turning down THE MALTESE FALCON and HIGH SIERRA) is superb, full of bad behaviour, good wise-cracks, and the fine proletarian toughness of classic Warner Brothers. Ann Sheridan enters the picture as a waitress and gets to shine with some fine smutty dialogue, bantering with schlubs ~

Raft: “A classy chassis.”

Sheridan: “Yes, and it’s all mine, too: I don’t owe any payments on it.”

Schlub: “I’d be glad to finance it, baby.”

Sheridan: “Who do you think you’re kidding? You couldn’t even pay for the headlights.”

Plus she’s gorgeous and sexual — her nipples are like bullets aimed straight for my heart. What goes wrong with the film can be traced in her character arc: to begin with, she’s tough, sassy and brazen, like the film. When Raft starts talking marriage, she’s become a supportive, respectful partner — kind of boring in screen terms, at least as portrayed here. By the last act, she and Bogie are thoroughly sidelined, yielding to Ida Lupino’s crazed vamp.

Now, I can’t not like Lupino in a film, she’s far too fabulous for that, but her character here is a piece of high melodrama grafted in by Dr. Orloff, and the body of the film is trying hard to reject the new tissue. Lupino fights for her place, hamming ferociously, working her way through every stock symptom of Hollywood lunacy. By the time of her last scene, her forehead is literally bulging with madness.

Top left — see the bulge?

It’s a gaudy and inappropriate display, made more entertaining by the stray bits of cockney in her accent, which come through most strongly when she’s being demented, which is most of the time. The whole Lupino plotline wrecks a very good film, but at least it wrecks it shamelessly and with verve. That’s part of the beauty of Walsh’s films, before widescreen and old age slowed him, they do everything so wholeheartedly.

While the trucking genre has never been what you’d call extensive, I kind of lament it’s apparent demise — I can’t think of any recent examples — did CONVOY shame it to death? It used to be that the really gutsy, smart American films were very often about working-class life. Now indie cinema deals almost exclusively with the middle classes and professional criminals. I love the idea of roping social consciousness together with genre and entertainment, but hardly anybody seems interested in doing this — genre films are just about genre and the committed social realists have a loathing of entertainment and a fear of trusting the audience to absorb a social message from subtext.

Still, I’m enjoying my time in truckerdom, so I shall be running Cy Endfield’s HELL DRIVERS shortly…

The hearth moved

Ground-breaking sexual shenanigans from Jules Dassin’s PHAEDRA. Faced with the challenging task of manufacturing sexual chemistry between his wife, Melina Mercouri, and Anthony Perkins, Dassin pulls out all the stops. The result is like a MOVIE MASH-UP of love scene clichés — soft focus; roaring fireplace; clenching hands; rain battering on window; the sweeping music of Mikis Theodorakis on the gramophone (there will be NO remarks about Anthony Perkins and Greek love in this post. Apart from this one). By the end it’s a wonder there’s a stick of furniture intact in that apartment.

David Thomson in his BioDic of Film, writes, “In good company, and a little drunk, HE WHO MUST DIE, PHAEDRA and 10.30PM SUMMER might cure would-be suicides.” I’ll allow that Dassin skirts the edges of absurdity in 10.30, and PHAEDRA looks like it plunges headlong into a basin of ludicrous pomp, but I still get a kick out of this scene. The effect is overdone but the individual elements are orchestrated with great skill — I like the compositions and editing and music.

I heard of an English teacher one time who would object to purple passages of sexual action in DH Lawrence with the words, “But it’s not LIKE that!” which is a good argument, though not necessarily one that should take precedence over all other concerns. I don’t think it applies to Dassin — taken metaphorically, his sex scene could be seen as quite authentic. Unless what you’re after is complete authenticity (which would mean SOUND EFFECTS, and none of us wants THAT) evoking the corny (there’s rarely anything ORIGINAL about sex) but overwhelming emotions of what General Ripper calls “the physical act of love” seems reasonable, and doing it without fear of looking silly seems at least commendable.

Kubrick told Michel Ciment that the exhilerating and goofy William Tell Overture time-lapse threesome in CLOCKWORK ORANGE was in part a reaction to the way movies tend to solemnize sex, and he had a point there, but sex is very often quite humourless. There’s plenty of room for giggling at the start, but there comes a point where that could be  OFF-PUTTING.

So, if sex is overwhelming, serious, and best treated in a stylised way — Dassin is surely the man for the job. He was dismissed for his “strained seriousness” by Andrew Sarris, but that seems somehow wrong: it’s no strain for Dassin to be serious. His lighter films from this period, TOPKAPI and NEVER ON SUNDAY, seem far more effortful (though I love TOPKAPI and make allowances for NOS).

Dassin was a Sexual Pioneer! The bisexual triangle of 10.30PM SUMMER must have been strong stuff for 1966. I also think there’s enough textual evidence in his work to deduce a keen interest in sado-masochism (whippings abound in THE LAW, RIFIFI…)

Sex, in the movies, is fraught with difficulty. Maybe because it’s universal but also distinctly personal. There’s a cringe-making story of a well-known actor who, in his first sex scene, grabbed his partner by the hair and began slamming her head off the pillow. “Cut! What are you doing?” He was totally perplexed. What’s the problem? Doesn’t everybody do it this way?

Everybody does it every which way! The first sex scene in a mainstream movie is supposed to be in ECSTASY, in 1933. Director Gustav Machatý attempted to evoke an orgasmic reaction from his star Hedy Lamarr by pricking her feet with a pin. “That would just be really annoying,” says my partner. “Maybe everybody Gustav Machatý slept with found him really annoying.”

Another technique — in RED ROAD, an actress appears to receive oral sex. In reality she was holding half a peach between her thighs for her co-star to munch on. Hey, it’s a system!

In SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, Barbet Schroeder wanted to film a more than usually convincing blow-job, so he purchased a dildo for Jennifer Jason Leigh to fellate: the hope was to show she had SOMETHING in her mouth without offending the censor by showing WHAT. But, perhaps fearful of insulting his male lead, Schroeder acquired a jaw-breakingly enormous plastic dinosaur appendage…

DON’T LOOK NOW is justly famous for it’s cinematically beautiful love scene. One story I heard, from former producer/director turned educationalist Brent MacGregor, who heard it from an assistant editor, casts an interesting light on the scene. Supposedly, Donald Sutherland was more “into” the sex scene than co-star Julie Christie, which resulted in (a) her walking off the set after one take and (b) Warren Beatty bursting into the cutting room and attempting to beat up director Nicolas Roeg.

I don’t generally credit such gossip, but a couple of aspects of it at least make sense — if you look at the actual lovemaking, MOST of what you see is consistent with a single hand-held shot. But bits of the shot were unusable as the cameraman was clambering over the bed, etc. With only one continuous take, partly no good, Roeg was forced to intercut, and all he could intercut WITH was neutral material, the couple dressing to go out (which would have to have been shot deliberately for the purpose, later, if we buy this version of events). And thus is born a thing of immense beauty and poetic resonance.

Donald Sutherland reports being locked in that bedroom “for hours” with Roeg, Christie, and an extremely noisy unblimped camera. But what’s seen in the film isn’t consistent with such a prolonged shoot. And what’s been rumoured about Roeg’s swinging lifestyle might be consistent with the desire to go a little further than usual in the name of realism…

(Also — looking through the scene for not-too-explicit frame grabs, I realised that it’s quite a bit more explicit than I’d previously thought. Much of the “stronger stuff” is compositionally decentred and hard to spot due to the pace of cutting, but… let’s just say I hope Julie Christie remembered to bring half a peach to the set…)

The Chills #5: What time is love?

 

Jules Dassin definitely deserves a Shadowplay Chills moment of his own. NIGHT AND THE CITY arguably has several — it certainly has the sweatiest leading man performance, from the atomic-powered Richard Widmark. Somebody recently described his character as a manic-depressive, and I thought that was probably a good diagnosis but it somehow takes away from the film. If Harry Fabian has a medical condition, his mistakes are not really his own. The left-leaning film-makers’ noirs tend to be very consciously about WRONG VALUES, like Joseph Losey’s THE PROWLER. They can be taken as a guide to how not to live your life, what not to desire. Maybe the best thing is to simultaneously hold the idea of Fabian as a psychologically tormented victim, and also, contrarily, as a product of a society that values success at any price — and it must be EXTRAVAGANT success.

A society.

Be that as it may, the clip I’ve plumped for is from the amazing 10.30PM SUMMER. Not everyone will approve. David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, recommends Dassin’s European art-house efforts as a cure for depression — he finds them unintentionally hilarious. I think Dassin is courageous for being unconcerned whether people like Thomson snicker.

Everybody’s a critic.

He’s attempting to fuse the qualities of European art-house movies — Antonioni, the nouvelle vague, the shade of Fellini’s TOBY DAMMIT to come, with the overwrought, operatic effusion of silent melodrama. Catalogue this one next to NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and MOONRISE as a headlong plunge into cinema antiquity, coupled with a few paths not followed — it’s a vision of cinema from an alternate universe. OK, maybe it’s a universe where people think Melina Mercouri looks good as a blonde, but with a little imagination we can all go there.

10.30PM SUMMER is available on DVD in France and the USA.

R.I.P. Jules Dassin

Aged 96. Damn, I was looking for a Jewish filmmaker to outlive Leni Riefenstahl. First Billy Wilder let me down, now this.

And yes, I let Richard Widmark’s death go unmentioned (but was gratified to see him get his due all over the blogosphere) but I’m glad I wrote about Widmark and Dassin when they were both very much alive.

My friend Duncan suggests that what with this and the passing of Abby Mann, it’s time for anybody closely associated with Widmark to worry.

A while back I gave a copy of NIGHT AND THE CITY to a friend on his birthday. Said friend had complained of an aversion to noir, and I wasn’t going to let that stand. Months later, you’ll be happy to know, Dassin’s film had cured him entirely, and he was watching it regularly with friends — it had become “like STAR WARS or something.” (You maybe have to be able to conceive of people watching STAR WARS regularly to be able to get that image, and I confess it’s a stretch for me, too.)

Here is a somewhat mysterious image of Dassin (the one with the flag) disguised as a beaver. It isn’t how *I* will be choosing to remember him, but for those of you who don’t know his work, this will LODGE IN YOUR BRAINS and force you to seek out NIGHT AND THE CITY and RIFIFI etc. The gain will be entirely yours.

It’s that light-bulb again.

(Warning — contains the human body.) 

Just wanted to share this opening sequence with you.

Jules Dassin and Marguerite Duras’ 10.30PM SUMMER is available to rent or buy in the U.S. It contains passages of incredible Pure Cinema and the whole thing is pitched at a level too shrill and hysterical even to be called Camp. It’s just Something Else.

Apart from the heightened looniness of Melina Mercouri’s diva performance, there’s a sense that the film looks both back to the intensity of silent cinema melodrama and forward to the more delirious aspects of ’60s art-house. There’s a night drive through narrow streets, lit only by car headlights, that directly prefigures Terence Stamp’s Ferrari jaunt in Fellini’s episode of SPIRITS OF THE DEAD. Almost identical! And there’s the rather surprising nudity and sexual frankness. And this wild opening, which has Giallo tendencies, plus that mysterious symphony of sounds. Watch it, then watch it again with your eyes closed. I mean, LISTEN to it.

The editing is superb, even when it goes into paroxysms of anti-continuity to control the amount of Nudity Level. I love the three quick shots of thunderous sky which make the heavens alive and menacing.

And Gabor Pogany’s lighting is something I can only describe using beatnik parlance (dons beret): he “blows my mind,” “flips my lid,” is “real gone,” etc.

Quote of the Day: “Phaedra”

 

Lee Hazlewood sings:

“Some velvet morning when I’m straight,
I’m gonna open up your gate,
And maybe tell you ’bout Phaedra,
and how she gave me life,
and how she made it in,
Some velvet morning when I’m straight.”

Nancy Sinatra sings:

“Flowers growing on the hill,
Dragonflies and daffodils,
Learn from us, very much,
Look at us, but do not touch,
Phaedra is my name.”

This is what’s been wowing me on my Nano recently.

(If clip doesn’t work, try this LINK.)

The video is a little hilarious, but then so’s the song, in all its epic pomp. Just GO WITH IT. Lee H. rides a very long horse with very short legs across Californian beachfront property out of PLANET OF THE APES and THE TERROR, while Nancy S. attempts to flatten the song’s soaring psychedelic poetry with her very presence, yet she’s evolved beyond the odd troll glimpsed in Corman’s THE WILD ANGELS and can now actually WORK IT, milking the camera until it begs for time out.

*

Nancy’s moist cavern is the same one seen in THE USUAL SUSPECTS, I think, and probably about a thousand other movies.

*

If anyone knows where I can get Jules Dassin’s FEDRA / PHAEDRA, I’m seriously keen to see it.

Quote of the Day: “It was moider!”

 

‘I decided that when I appeared before the Committee I would expose them as being the un-Americans. That’s the line I took. When I began to testify, I immediately said I had knowledge of un-American activities through mny research. I said, “Look, I have a list of synagogues that have been burned. I have a list of homes of blacks in the South and in the North that Ku Klux Klansmen have defaced. I want to give the Committee all of my research and my knowledge of these un-American activities.” They said, believe it or not, “We’re not interested in that.” I said, “Let’s make a note of that–you’re not interested in these un-American activities that I have knowledge of.” Then I defied the Committee, using every constitutional amendment there was to keep them from shutting me up, and showed that they had been in business around seventeen years, with the purpose of recommending legislation to Congress, and yet they had never in all those years proposed a single piece of legislation. I attacked them as being part of a conspiracy to impose censorship on American theater and film, because as soon as you tell people who they can’t and won’t hire, you also tell them what they can and can’t present. That was my line, and I got away with it.’

~ Lionel Stander, in Tender Comrades, a Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle.

This book, a collection of fascinating interviews with prominent blacklistees (including directors Jules Dassin, Martin Ritt and John Berry), is the best I’ve read so far on the witch-hunt years, maybe tied with Only Victims, the published version of actor Robert Vaughn’s doctoral thesis, which is also a marvellously wise and impassioned account of the period — in his closing chapter Vaughn convincingly argues that American cinema’s development was seriously stunted by the climate of fear surrounding any kind of political discussion. 

(Somebody told me Vaughn has taken a swerve to the right in his political views more recently. I’d hate to think this was true.)

The Twinkler

When top cinematographer Henri Alekan came to the Edinburgh Film Festival, I think I was the first person in the audience to shoot my hand up with a question (helpful hint: there’s usually a lull before anybody volunteers, so if you have a question ready, jump in there).

I asked about Jean Marais’ first appearance in Cocteau’s LA BELLE ET LA BETE. As “The Beast” steps briskly into view, sideways, his eyes appear to FLASH. I asked if this was deliberate, and if so, how was it achieved?

Well, I should’ve known better. The Great Cameraman affixed me with his bright gaze.

“It was deliberate,” he replied, through his interpreter. But either the second (non-dumb-ass) part of the question hadn’t been translated, or old Henri preferred to be enigmatic on the subject, because he never answered it.

And then everybody else in the audience took their cue from me and asked a lot of questions about whether the colour in WINGS OF DESIRE “was deliberate”, or whether the beautiful lighting of Audrey Hepburn in ROMAN HOLIDAY “was deliberate”. Embarrassing.

Anyhow, freezing the image, or going thru it in Still-Advance seems to provide an answer: the eyes have probably been retouched somehow, either with an optical or with neg-scratching. I didn’t want to believe this because I like the way low-tech FX work predominates in LA BELLE and Cocteau’s other films. The effects literally harken back to the days of Melies, and we don’t have to spend any time “wondering how they did it” — we KNOW at first glance how they did it, and so we get over that and just accept it as magic.

Of course, it’s just possible that Marais has little pieces of mirror affixed to his eyelids and is blinking as he emerges in order to sharply reflect the strong light that’s hitting his upper face…

I love that effect, quite unreal, where somebody has particularly bright light on their upper face. Of course such lighting CAN happen in real life, but in movies it can and should happen MUCH MORE OFTEN.

Alekan shot Jules Dassin’s continental caper TOPKAPI using a lot of lurid opticals, filters and gels, to create a kaleidoscopic, quintessentially silly ’sixties vibe. I love it, but seemingly not everybody agrees. One film archivist I met, who was given the job of scanning the movie for location shots of Istanbul (dunno why) said it gave him a headache for a week. This miracle advance in Neurological Cinema is only possible when you have fine artists like Alekan and Dassin who are willing to lay aside all the good taste they’ve cultivated over the years and just wallow in glorious photochemical kitsch:

This last image features another favourite thing of mine: an obviously fake set!

Mmmmmm…

Lighting

bulbOriginally uploaded by donpayasos

I figured out how to do frame grabs! And for a total techno-yokel like me, this is a considerable achievement.

This is a lightbulb which has a starring role in the first scene of Jules Dassin’s 1030PM SUMMER. Mr. Dassin is one of Shadowplay’s Official Nonagenarians, along with Richard Widmark.

The light bulb is the first casualty of this film, which has a fairly high body count for an art film, although admittedly one character departs the film without leaving any trace at all…

Very Much Alive.

 

There’s a longstanding joke among my film quiz colleagues, involving stalwart member Simon Carr, who has a tendency to pronounce celebrities dead, based only on the evidence that they’re on the elderly side.

First it was Glenn Ford. Now, Glenn Ford really IS dead, although as a believer in reincarnation he may be back among us by now*, but at the time Simon first raised the subject, Mr. 1950s Masculinity was still “very much alive”, to quote Johnny Depp’s Ed Wood.

Next up was Richard Widmark. ‘He MUST be dead,’ insisted Simon**, looking more and more like a young Ian Bannen. But he wasn’t, and he still isn’t, and this is a source of rejoicing in these wintry times, with grim death gargling up at us from the gutters, as Joel McCrea says in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS.

93 today! A Birthday he shares with my big brother Sean, who is perhaps less venerable but no less dear to me. Happy birthday, fellahs!

Widmark gave us the cackling psychopath par excellence in KISS OF DEATH, using his own laugh,and he played the sweatiest lead role ever, outside a jungle pic, in NIGHT AND THE CITY. I gifted the Criterion DVD to a friend who didn’t like noir (”It all seems to be men in hats double-crossing each other,”) and now it’s his personal STAR WARS type obsession, a film about only the darkest and most corrupt things that’s perversely life-affirming and exhilarating to watch. Widmark’s Harry Fabian is a big part of this, a dreamer who so badly wants to Be A Success, and seems haunted by some inner premonition of miserable failure.

Another great thrill with this film is the British setting. Sure, Widmark and Gene Tierney talking about “quid” and “Man-chest-er” is distracting at first, but only for ONE SCENE. Then we’re into an evocative pulpy world perfectly transposed to post-war London. It’s either the best American British film or the best British American film.

Oh, and let’s not forget Googie Withers.

Widmark is smart and tough in real life too. I like this story from the shooting of TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, the last Hammer horror film and a better movie than you’d think.

Widmark appears and asks cameraman David Watkin, “Where’s my key light?”

Now, Watkin comes from documentaries and doesn’t do things the traditional way. He’s a brilliant, innovative cinematographer, responsible for the look of THE KNACK, MADEMOISELLE, THE DEVILS, CATCH 22 and HELP! but he comes from a world very different from Widmark’s classical Hollywood experience.

“Well, the thing is, I don’t really work with a key light, Richard.”

“Well, I don’t really work without one,” says Widmark, and walks off the set.

I’m on Watkin’s side, of course, but I’m not telling this story to put Widmark down, I think it’s a rather suave come-back line.

On the subject of Dead Or Not, a few years back filmmaker and writer Mark Cousins made a wager on £10 with Sean Connery, as they disagreed about whether Leni Riefenstahl was still numbered among the living. Mark was right: though pushing 100, dear old Leni was still marching on, kept alive by the power of evil.

Although he won the bet, as far as I know Mark still hasn’t collected his tenner from the stingy Scotsman, who may actually be avoiding moving back here to his homeland for fear of having to part with the cash.

*Glenn Ford felt that his lifelong affinity with horses suggested he’d been an equestrian in a previous life. Possibly a Mongolian plainsman.

Or possibly not.