Fallen on her feet

 

I just read this fine piece on DAISY KENYON by Zach Gallagher Campbell, Dan Sallitt and Damien Bona, and then this nice review by Glenn Erickson, which alleges that Preminger’s 1945 noir FALLEN ANGEL, embodying his long-take, fluid style, has only ten shots in its first fifteen minutes. I was actually surprised, because I know the opening fairly well, I’ve studied it and taught it, but I’ve never counted the shots. It had seemed to me that while Preminger does sometimes go for pretty long takes, what’s most impressive is the way he makes the shots WORK HARD for him, with the camera moving for several different reasons at once. I don’t think the sheer bravado of his his shot duration compares to Ophuls’ monster sequence-shots, but the shots are complex and intricate in other ways. So I was tempted to go back to the scene, not to check the shot-count was correct, because I’m sure it is, but to analyse more closely how and why Preminger moves the camera, something which had distracted me from the actual length of the takes.

I think there are FIVE MAIN REASONS for a director to move the camera in narrative cinema. When I’m working with Scott Ward, a fine cinematographer, we often talk about the camera’s MOTIVATION for moving, in exactly the same way you’d discuss an actor’s motivation for doing something. A director might want to achieve a particular visual effect, but unless a lucid motivation can be devised for the actor or the camera’s action, the result will be phony. So, the FIVE MOTIVATIONS are:

1) Following a moving subject. This seems like the most basic and crude reason of all for camera movement, but it can be tackled in the most subtle and curious ways. It also includes moments where the camera might move COUNTER to the subject, but still in reaction to its movement. When Mifune backs away from his turncoat army in THRONE OF BLOOD, the camera moves FORWARD, following a parallel line but in the opposite direction. A shot that had been looking past Mifune at his men, taking in his POV, is now flipped so that we’re looking AT Mifune from an angle approximating the POV of his men — the camera has changed sides, and now Mifune’s REALLY in trouble.

2) Giving us the POV of a moving character. Again, this seems simple enough, but it’s the essence of much of Hitchcock’s direction, forcing us into the character’s position (but for another view, see Mr. Sallitt again). Taking this to the kind of extreme that Hitchcock rather disapproved of, we get DePalma’s endless subjective stalkercam shots. I’d love to see BDP confronted with Hitchcock’s pooh-poohing of this kind of technique in the Hitchcock-Truffaut interview book. No doubt he’d have an answer, but I’d like to hear what it is.

3) Exploring space. Most common in establishing shots, this use of the moving camera allows the audience to explore the scene in three dimensions. As a scene develops, narrative concerns often force this type of action to a halt, so that the audience can focus more on developing plot points. I’ve always had a suspicion that the Italian cinema has more of an investment in this kind of movement than any other, beginning with CABIRIA and the like, where the camera movement was a necessary device to allow the viewer to take in the size of the sets. Griffith adapted this for the tracking elevator shots of INTOLERANCE — crudely put, the shot’s purpose is to show of the scenery, but this has dramatic values too.

4) Telling the story. The camera can become authorial, prowling around IN SEARCH OF CLUES, as in the opening of REAR WINDOW. Hitchcock’s camera here becomes a curious observer, a character in its own right, gliding from object to object, gathering information that helps to bring us up to speed with the in media res narrative.

5) What am I forgetting? There’s always one… ah yes, the psychological tracking shot. A character thinks, and the camera moves towards them (usually), and their thought seems to acquire real importance. An early example of this might be Jannings reading his letter of dismissal in THE LAST LAUGH. The first Hollywood instance I can think of is in HAND ACROSS THE TABLE. Fred MacMurray smokes pensively and broods, and Mitchell Leisen pushes the camera towards him. Nothing is motivating this camera movement save THOUGHT ITSELF.

There are all sorts of other purposes behind camera movement, but I think of these as side-benefits. They may be incredibly important (adding excitement and animation, increasing audience identification) but they are not sufficient in themselves to actually get the camera moving. As Aki Kaurismaki once facetiously said, the camera’s a big heavy thing, and if you’ve been drinking the night before it’s going to take quite a lot of effort to get that thing moving. Also, I think a director who swings the camera about JUST to “create excitement” is likely to be a dumb filmmaker. See Michael Bay.

So, by way of that massive discursion, we return to the opening of FALLEN ANGEL.

SHOT 1. As the titles end, we find ourselves on a bus, looking at the driver’s back. Noticing something behind us, the driver parks the bus and gets up, passing the camera, which pans after him and follows him down the aisle (Motivation 1). The driver and camera both stop standing over Dana Andrews. The driver then shakes Andrews awake and tells him his ticket “ran out at the last stop”, at which point Preminger restarts the camera movement to get closer to Andrews and let us see his face (Motivation 4). This not only “establishes” the protagonist’s face, it also imparts some special significance to him. It’s some kind of a “hero shot”, you could say. Andrews then stands, forcing the camera back Motivation 1 again) and leaves frame, having retrieved his coat and bag from the luggage rack.

The first cut:

SHOT 2 shows Andrews leaving the bus, and it’s a real beauty. Starting wide and high, we start to close in on Dana, fine fellow that he is, as the bus drives off screen right — that is the sideways bus movement triggers a forwards camera movement, towards Andrews, a weird abstract combination of Motivation 1 and 3 and 4 with maybe even a touch of 5 (I did say Preminger was fluid). Worse yet for my neat distinctions, Andrews, having paused for another heroic photo op, turns and heads off, and now we’re following him in a clear case of Motivation 1, until we reach the town signpost and he pauses to look at it — the camera has now framed Andrews and the sign, in something that could be read as Motivation 2 (POV) at one remove, or Motivation 4 (the authorial move, feeding us geographical info), but which was clearly just Motivation 1 at the time we were actually moving.

SHOT 3. Dissolve to a seaside diner.

 

Andrews walks into shot, forcing a pan, and we start tracking after him, nearing the door of the establishment. Opening the door, Dana gives us a nicely framed little scene at the counter, and we pick up a line of dialogue from proprietor Pop (Percy Kilbride). The frame has transformed into a sort of over-the-shoulder view, which is cut off as Andrews carries on inside and closes the door in our face, forcing a cut.

SHOT 4. So far the film has been nothing but sequence shots, each scene a single take, but now comes a very complex scene of narrative set-up, character introductions and interaction, so the cutting hots up, understandably. The first shot of the scene shows Andrews finishing the shutting of the door, and follows him to the counter where we get another, closer OTS shot on the discussion between Pop and Charles Bickford’s detective. Here we learn there’s a missing person report being filed.

SHOT 5. The first stationary shot of the film — Looking past Bickford and his cop pal at Pop. It establishes Pop’s appearance more clearly, and allows us to momentarily forget Dana, who has been set up as witness to all this but can now by sidelined.

SHOT 6 is a reverse favouring Bickford, but it swiftly develops beyond that. The cop exits and we pan with him to the door, where we find ugly old Bruce Cabot, seen in passing as Andrews entered, who now walks to the counter, necessitating a pan back the way we came. This is all Motivation 1, but it’s made satisfying and complex by the way we lose one subject and find another in a nicely choreographed fashion. Now we’re back on Bickford, who gets some dialogue that establishes him as something of a blowhard, then Cabot walks off, necessitating a Motivation 1 pan, which discovers Andrews again — the Motivation 1 has served the purpose of an authorial move, only more discretely. Andrews orders coffee.

(Pause while Cairns goes and makes some too.)

Mmm, coffee.

Now, that shot on Andrews (still the versatile shot 6) becomes an over-the-shoulder when Pop steps in to take his order, which then allows us to cut to -

SHOT 7, a reverse on Pop, over Dana A’s shoulder (note: this is a different set-up to the previous Pop-shot, which was at the other end of the counter). Now we get a hairy moment — as Pop obligingly walks off to fix coffee and a burger for Andrews, his movement is meant to pull the camera off to one side to end up on a shot looking past Andrews at Bickford. I’m not 100% certain if this is Motivation 1 or Motivation 2, as Andrews shifts his attention to Bickford at the same time. It’s a nice move, but the ambiguity isn’t too helpful: maybe it would have been better to let Pop walk off then have Andrews’ shifting in his chair motivate the reframing?

Jingle! Someone’s at the door.

SHOT 8 and Holy Wow! It’s Linda “What I got don’t need beads” Darnell. A beautiful entrance, and then we follow her to a seat, the camera pivoting around Andrews’ back to keep her in view as she removes her feet. Linda is the former missing person, now the returning prodigal, with sore feet. Cut to:

SHOT 9. Preminger’s desire to make each shot complex and multi-functional becomes almost EXCESSIVE — rather than just have Bickford enter Darnell’s frame, he cuts to a medium-closeup expressive of lust and authority, pulling away from Bickford as he advances right at us, and slipping round the side into a sleazy two-shot. Just as we can’t bear looking at this a second longer, Pop’s voice is heard OS, motivating a cut to –

SHOT 10. Pop practically drops his tray when he sees Linda, ruining a perfectly good medium close shot almost immediately but pulling us into a really useful group shot that situates Andrews as outsider/observer. Linda steals his burger. Preminger reframes slightly after Bickford leaves, almost unnoticed (his sexual menace ignored by the contemptuous L Darnell) and D Andrews swaps seats to get his damn coffee. Then Andrews swivels on his bar-stool to frankly eavesdrop, and Preminger eases in on Linda as she stuffs her face with processed meat (Mmm, processed meat), a camera movement that simulates Andrews’ narrowing focus of attention (Motivation 2 crossed with 5, kind of). When Andrews gets up, the shot pulls back again, a straightforward Motivation 1 reframing. When Linda forces Andrews to break his last banknote paying for the coffee (this is where her unpleasantness of a character assumes strangely ALLURING proportions) the camera pulls back a tiny bit with NO MOTIVATION AT ALL, save a sort of abstract Motivation 1 response to  Pop’s exit, and we don’t seem to mind a bit, discovering only at the end of the move that this pull-back allows Pop to be seen as he works the cash register in the background.

Dana exits.

Appearing in only three shots, Linda Darnell has neatly pocketed the whole movie, which will struggle to stay on its feet when she departs around the two-thirds mark. Meanwhile, Preminger has shown how comfortable he is moving the camera with more than one motivation, frequently creating subtle dramatic emphases while appearing simply to be following characters around…

Oh, I buzzed forward to the ten-minute mark, and I find Mr. Erickson’s shot-count slightly off — there are eighteen shots up to then by my reckoning, not counting the credits sequence which eats up the first of those ten minutes. But the general point is quite correct: Otto milks his shots until they squeak.

Greenwood, Plainview, Skeffington and Copland

 

I thought I better write the comparative study of MR. SKEFFINGTON (1944) and THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007), before anyone else does.

Seriously, the two have nothing in common so this is the usual exercise in absurdity but both films did make me think about MUSIC a lot.

Of course, Jonny Greenwood’s monumental work for T.W.B.B. is extremely praiseworthy and interesting and has rightly provoked much discussion. And the fact that this major work has been denied a place in the running for an Oscar is an outrage — it’s more obvious than ever that the Best Score award is a closed shop and non-Americans need not apply. Ennio Morricone, f.f.s, has never won, despite a nomination for THE MISSION, one of his great works — when Bette Midler read his name from the podium, the applause brought the house down — “Ennio has a fan,” observed Ms. Midler. Nino Rota for THE GODFATHER and Michael Nyman for THE PIANO were barred on the same grounds as Greenwood: their scores used previously existing themes (but, perversely, Rota was allowed a half-share in a golden swordsman for THE GODFATHER II, even though that movie features predominantly themes written for the first film,) In the absence of an award for “Best Adapted Score,” the system should be altered so that an Oscar need not be denied to the year’s best soundtrack. 

I generally try to ignore the asinine decisions arrived at annually by the academy, but when the best film score of the year or maybe DECADE is excluded even from the privilege of being overlooked by numb-skulls, something has got to be done. Or, at any rate, said. Or blogged.

End of Oscars digression. Start of MR. SKEFFINGTON digression. A product of Warner Bros’ esteemed Masochism Department, this wartime weepie takes Bette Davis and Claude Raines through one marriage and two world wars, and is one of the few Hollywood films to mention Jews and concentration camps. The propaganda element is very delicately stitched into the overall pattern, while the central theme, “A woman is only beautiful when she is loved,” is wielded like a length of drainpipe in the hands of an enraged Viking (how the Viking got his hands ON the drainpipe is outwith the purlieu of this piece, which is an exercise in film criticism rather than Scandinavian ethnography or plumbing).

Vincent Sherman, who made one of our favourite gangster / women’s picture crossovers, THE DAMNED DON’T CRY, is here a smooth and sensitive channel for what they call the Genius of the System, creating an elegant and emotional studio picture that isn’t anonymous but isn’t exactly personal either, but is extremely GOOD.

Jerome Cowan turns up as an aging suitor, bringing home to the heroine the reality of her advancing years — a function he repeated years later in Mitchell Leisen’s great Twilight Zone episode, “The 16mm Shrine”. I’m certain Leisen must have seen and remembered him here.

Walter Abel does what Walter Abel does, marvellously. Imported from Broadway and unsuccessfully cast as D’Artagnan, Abel found his footing in second banana roles, bringing cut-throat timing and toothy wit to his comic work.

But Claude Rains is MISTER WIT. A film automatically gets wittier when he’s around. Here, as in CASABLANCA, he has the Epstein brothers supplying him with some great material, but he always makes more of it than anyone else. “When a man becomes repetitious, it is time to see the District Attorney,” is a lovely line in context, but C.R. makes it soar over our heads, flip round in a vertical 180°, and skewer us right in the occipital lobe.

Bette Davis presides over the whole affair with an iron hand, in a velvet glove, clutching a length of drainpipe (a different one). She plays the lighter scenes with the whimsy turned up to 11 (a whimsical Bette in full flow may be too much for those of a delicate sensibility) and throws herself into the third-act suffering with the zeal of a flagellant. It’s a terrifying lesson in Star Power.

But the music… I love Franz Waxman. His score for THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN is of Total Importance in the history of Hollywood music, and is a joy to the ears. When angels and demons have interspecies sex with each other, this is what they listen to. Waxman also brought the same wit to another, more obscure, James Whale movie the same year — in the opening party scene of REMEMBER LAST NIGHT? Waxman appears to provide a jazz tune as source music, but is actually underscoring a series of little dialogue vignettes in the most precise way: foreground music masquerading as background. And that’s just two films out of five scored in one year out of a thirty-five year career (which also includes that Twilight Zone episode…)

But for some reason, Waxman can’t quite get a handle on MR. SKEFFINGTON. Faced with a film that starts mostly light and journeys into dark and tortured terrain, Franz attacks the comedy like it’s a Carry On film, while overstressing the subtle hints of tragedy to come like Bernard Herrmann accompanying the sinking of the Lusitania. Once the film settles into weepie mode, the score finds its correct register and things progress smoothly, but it’s a rocky first hour.

This dovetails with what I wanted to say about Mr. Greenwood’s exciting score for THERE WILL BE BLOOD, because one of the striking things about that, apart from the sheer impact and originality of the sonorities, is the way the highly emotive and forceful music DOESN’T synchronise with the moods onscreen. While Waxman is slamming emphasis onto each flutter of an eyelid, Greenwood lays thick aural layers of terror over scenes that don’t have any apparent terror in them — he’s preparing you for the NEXT scene, which will have plenty. When Plainview (John Huston [Daniel Day-Lewis]) is promising wealth and health and education to the townsfolk, the music is plangent and heartbreaking, playing the mood of some upcoming scene, an hour away at least, where they find out they’ve been cheated, and playing it so effectively that the scene doesn’t even have to be included in the film.

Unusual!

The score is actually so overwhelming that if it DID synchronise precisely with the tones onscreen it might seem hammy and bombastic — instead it manages to be poetic and allusive without pulling any punches whatsoever.

It did remind me a very tiny bit of Aaron Copland’s score for THE HEIRESS, but Copland only gets ahead by a few seconds. Nevertheless, it’s a remarkable thing he does — by signalling an emotional change, a realisation or a plot development before it’s happened, he’s actually re-writing the movie. Copland and Greenwood both show how a score can be far more than an accompaniment or a mood-enhancer, it can be both part of film story-telling and an abstract force whose role can extend beyond the moment.

Quote of the Day: Mad about the boy

 

A riverside glade in the moonlight.

A romantic clinch, between Joan Fontaine (posh English wife) and Arturo de Cordova (saucy French pirate).

A very lush arrangement of Clair de Lune on the soundtrack.

Arturo: “If only you were a boy!”

FRENCHMAN’S CREEK (1944)

Script by Talbot Jennings from Daphne DuMaurier’s novel.

Directed by Mitchell Leisen.

(Arturo explains that if Joan were a boy she could come to sea with him, so she drags up and joins him on his white and gold pirate ship where the sailors rob the English, steal lots of women’s dresses and put them on, and kiss each other.)

David Chierichetti: “I feel that in FRENCHMAN’S CREEK you were so involved with the visual aspects of the color, the costumes and the sets, that you lost sight of the story values.”

Mitchell Leisen: “You tell me what the story values were in FRENCHMAN’S CREEK and I’ll answer that. She falls in love with a pirate, leaves her husband then comes back in time not to get caught. That’s all. It’s as dull as dishwater and it’s a lousy picture.”

It catches real fire in ONE SCENE — where Joan Fontaine has to defend herself against Basil Rathbone’s dastardly Lord Rockingham without any prospect of rescue. It’s pretty unusual to see a leading lady have to handle the bad guy all by herself, and the outcome is both convincing, grisy, and a touch camp (flattening Basil with a suit of armour is always going to seem SLIGHTLY hysterical).

The whole film, lacking in dramatic tension to a quite baffling degree, is half-rescued by its startling gayness: it’s as close to being actually OUT as it can get without taking that crucial extra step, impossible at the time, of actually BEING out. 

Quote of the day: King Zog Shot Back!

 

“I might have known: every time I try to see The Magic Flute, something happens! I have yet to get a peek at the third act. Last time, King Zog lost Albania right in the middle of the opening aria!”

~ newsman Walter Abel in ARISE MY LOVE.

Directed by Mitchell Leisen.

Screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

The beautifully-named Albanian monarch is the only world leader in history to have responded to an assassination attempt by drawing his own pistol and blasting away at his assailant, a noteworthy fact commemorated in Nicholas Roeg’s installment of the operatic compendium film ARIA – which makes the connection between Zog and opera two-fold.

Let the Shadows Play

Maurice Binder’s titles for Ken Russell’s THE BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN (the second sequel to THE IPCRESS FILE with Michael Caine).

Saul Bass gets a very good press, and rightly so, but maybe we should also talk more about Maurice Binder? While Bass is more consistently elegant and tasteful, Binder could be guilty of breathtaking kitsch (those later Bond titles!), as well as more classical work.

ARABESQUE is a film made by Stanley Donen, who told his cinematographer, the great Christopher Challis (TALES OF HOFFMAN) that the script was so bad their only hope was to try every crazy photographic trick in the book. It works! The presence of Sophia Loren and Alan Badel also help compensate for the fey script and the usual Gregory Peck drag-factor.

A similar contempt for the story enlivens THE IPCRESS FILE, where director Sid Furie started the shoot by tearing up and stamping on his script in front of the whole crew. “THAT’S what I think of THAT!”

Michael Caine supposes he must have had to borrow somebody else’s copy for the rest of the film.

Anyhow, Binder certainly gets these films off to a groovy start. I once asked production designer Ken Adam about Binder. The two had worked on many of the same James Bond films. I made the mistake of pronouncing the name “Morris Bynd-er”. But Binder was a German like Adam himself:

“Maw-reece Bin-der,” he enunciated, “was a lovely man, who liked, very much, to photograph silhouetted naked ladies.”

Well, yes.

Binder himself told the story of his struggle with a model’s pubic hair, which stuck out in a censorable mohawk formation, visible as she turned in silhouette. ‘She wouldn’t shave, so I thought I’d smooth it down with vaseline. I was just patting it down when [producer] Cubby Broccoli walked in. He just looked at me, then said, “Maurice, I think maybe I am paying you too much.”‘

Maybe sometime I’ll post the titles of Billy Wilder’s THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, a favourite film of mine. Elegant and witty credits by Binder, with Miklos Rosza’s finest and most melancholy score. ‘Why is it so SAD?’ asks Fiona. The violin theme started life as a concerto by Rosza, and Wilder listened to it while writing the script. The sadness seeped into the comedy, making for Wilder’s most deeply-felt work since maybe THE APARTMENT. It’s also Wilder’s SCOTTISH FILM and makes better use of Robert Stephens’ unique gifts than any other movie — although working with Wilder was so stressful for Stephens, he attempted suicide partway through the shoot.

(While Mitchell Leisen would annoy Wilder by cutting his scripts to make things more comfortable for the actors, Wilder, it seems, never did ANYTHING for the comfort of his actors…)

My friend Roland suggests that you tend to find the best title sequences attached to the worst films, and there are certainly cases of that, but as long as there are films like TPLOSH around, I can’t subscribe to that as a guiding principle.

Swing High!

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.

The Last Temptation of Christmas

This is from REMEMBER THE NIGHT, written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen. Though Sturges was often very critical of the way other directors handled his work during his screenwriter-for-hire period, and his script was considerably shortened by Leisen here, we know this is one of the Paramount films Sturges kept a print of, so he must have been somewhat pleased with the result.

The overused word “underrated” is easy to apply to Leisen, particularly after the decades-long campaign waged against his reputation by another writer, Billy Wilder. Interestingly, in Wilder’s last major interview, with Cameron Crowe, while Crowe procedes with the usual Wilder-approved Leisen-bashing (based in part on the director’s background as art director for DeMille, and his homosexuality), Wilder actually softens his view, with an only-slightly-grudging “He was a very good director.”

More on Leisen soon. And somebody needs to write the “definitive cinematic study” of Sterling Holloway, whose rendition of “The End of a Perfect Day” is calculated to release those pent-up emotions that tend to attach themselves to us at this time of year.

“As it turned out, the picture had quite a lot of schmaltz, a good dose of schmertz and just enough schmutz to make it box office.” — P. Sturges.

My pal and Benshi film describer David has a fine overview of Leisen’s career and themes HERE:

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/05/leisen.html