…if there’s any way to get a copy of Preston Sturges’ last film, THE DIARIES OF MAJOR THOMPSON, also known as THE FRENCH THEY ARE A FUNNY RACE?
Described as “almost defiantly unfunny” by one critic, this seems to have been a somewhat blighted project. Sturges, with what Rene Clair identified as “turn-of-the-century schoolboy French,” had to direct this film in two languages. His supposedly bilingual stars, Jack Buchanan (Scottish musical comedian, best known today for THE BANDWAGON) and Martine Carol, were in reality so incompetent in their respective second languages that they couldn’t understand one another and would miss their cues. Buchanan was also in the early stages of the spinal cancer that would kill him, which might well have cut down on his propensity for being adorably hilarious.
Come to think of it, why the hell do I want to see this film? Because it’s Sturges, and I love him. Also because all the other late-period Sturges films with shaky reputations have turned out to be well worth seeing. On first viewing, UNFAITHFULLY YOURS struck me as two-thirds masterpiece and one-third turkey. Now I’m convinced it’s a truly great comedy, and even the “bad” bits seem more like some unusual kind of brilliance. The hideously protracted, repetitious, agonizingly unfunny slapstick finale perfectly captures the experience of jealousy at work in the human mind. And THE BEAUTIFUL BLONDE FROM BASHFUL BEND, whose own co-scenarist thought it the worst film ever made, actually has plenty of funny stuff in it. So I have to give this one a chance.
There’s an unproduced Preston Sturges script, first written in the thirties, later floated in the forties as a possible Gene Tierney vehicle, called MATRIX. I once contacted the Sturges family via their website, asking if there were any plans to publish the document. It would be more useful to have out there than all the scripts of the Sturges films that WERE made, excellent though they are.
Alas, the Sturgeses (Sturgi?) replied that they preferred to keep MATRIX to themselves, which struck me as slightly selfish, but it’s their right I suppose.
So we must use our imaginations as to what Preston Sturges’ MATRIX might have been…
The Cast:
Eddie Bracken … Neo (Let’s be honest, how many computer geeks look like Keanu Reeves?)
William Demarest … Morpheus (I want to see him do that pratfall [above] in “bullet time”)
Ella Raines … Trinity (my octogenarian friend Lawrie said, “I was always very interested in Ella Raines, because I’d heard she was a lesbian, and of course… I had no idea what that meant.”)
Al Bridge … Agent Smith (he’s got the DRAWL)
Jimmy Conlin … Oracle
Franklin Pangborn … The Architect
Veronica Lake … Persephone
Akim Tamiroff … Twin #2
Lionel Stander … Twin #1
Eric Blore … the Merovingian (and why not?)
I feel a little guilty about casting a white guy in Larry Fishburn’s role, but I would feel more guilty about casting Sturges’ favourite black actor, “Snowflake”… although he’s a very funny guy.
Sturges had the best stock company of supporting players of any filmmaker. I bet you could cast any movie with that troupe. As Easter approaches, I’m thinking about doing KING OF KINGS.
Musician / singer / songwriter Daniel Prendiville has a series of interesting suggestions for Cinema Euphoria, our ongoing project to condense the sum total of human happiness into a few thousand feet of celluloid and look at it on Youtube with a wry smile.
‘- the car chase in What’s Up Doc?
- the wedding scene in Guys & Dolls - I was always struck by the way the wedding crowd disperses immediately after the nuptials. It seems to emphasise just how impersonal the big city is - one minute you’re the most important person in the world - the next…
- anything from Welcome to Collingwood - particularly the dialogue where they are describing various capers.’
I like all these suggestions but I find MY HANDS ARE TIED — I don’t have a good copy of GUYS AND DOLLS and the key moment is not on Youtube. Nor are any scenes from WTC, the Russo brothers’ remake of Mario Monicelli’s BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET. So, just like Cybill Shepherd in the ’70s, we are STUCK WITH BOGDANOVITCH.
But that’s no big problem. Although this sequence from the end of Peter Bogdanovitch’s film of Buck Henry’s script is a bit bigger and altogether more climactic than I generally like for Cinema Euphoria (get me some more little moments, you… lurkers, you) we can remedy that easily by concentrating on the Small Things in this big-ass sequence.
The way this clip starts is super-great: I love the little musical set of sounds created by Verna Fields’ sharp and witty editing: muffled shouting / tip-tap footsteps of Streisand and O’Neil / car-horn blasts / whistling patsy. It’s kind of beautiful just to listen to.
Verna F’s inspired work (she also cut AMERICAN GRAFFITI and JAWS before retiring) continues with the marvellous orchestration of LOUD and QUIET in the coming chase. The way she cuts ahead to peaceful scenes lying in the path of the mayhem creates antici… pation that builds the comedy up. I’ve argued here that Boggo sometimes lets his dramatic instincts get in the way of his comedy ambitions, playing on spectacle and suspense in ways that aren’t relevant to slapstick, but it has to be admitted that few filmmakers since the ’20s have even attempted classical slapstick on this scale and with half this amount of success.
(Billy Wilder noted in the ’70s that only Richard Lester and Blake Edwards could shoot slapstick. Before that there were Tati and Tashlin. Preston Sturges loved slapstick but wasn’t particularly good at it. In the silent era there were many many brilliant orchestrators of elaborate visual gag sequences. Now the closest thing is the cartoony exaggeration of Jeunet or Raimi, which is a form of heightened action cinema, a different animal altogether.)
Bogdanovitch himself got to play around with pratfalls again in NICKELODEON, a flawed film (studio interference is at least partly to blame) but one that does boast some rather brilliant comic action, again filmed in bold long-shots like dance sequences. It would be great to see him turned loose on this kind of material again — Boggy may not be as hot as he was back in the day but I do think that any producer who gave him his head on a decent visual comedy piece would make a killing.
Longterm Shadowplayer Elver Loho emailed me some while ago with a query for the blog, which I’ve been meaning to get around to. But it’s a toughie:
‘I come from a background of computer science and we had plenty of
great academic journals in the field. A lot of research was happening
all the time and academic journals are a great way to keep up with it.
Now that I’m making the switch to screenwriting, I find that there are
a couple of guru-written books on the subject that everyone likes
and… that’s pretty much it.
‘Hell, the biggest works about on one of the most important aspects of
screenwriting — story structure — were written more than 50 years
ago by Propp and Campbell and don’t even mention movies. I haven’t
come across anything that would even begin to rival the research that
those two guys did.
(Vladimir Propp & his magic lamp)
‘This is depressing. Surely, there’s academic research going on in the
field, right? Because I was browsing the online database of academic
journals that my local university library has and there’s a ton of
journals on literature. I even found an issue that was wholly
dedicated to the phenomenon of text in Ancient Roman wall paintings.
Surely if there are people who care enough about text in Ancient Roman
wall paintings to write research papers on the topic, there must be
people who care enough about film to write research papers on the
topic. But where are they? Where do they publish their research? And
is there even research going on in the field or are we trapped in a
New Age type of guru worship?’
Elver’s right, firstly, in that practically everything to do with screenwriting is depressing! Most good scripts don’t get filmed, many lousy ones do, and even the good ones that make it through often get mangled in the process. (I’ve been part of this process as both re-writer – for my sins – and re-written.) The research situation being depressing is consistent and unsurprising.
Magazine-wise, these are probably the best shows in town:
But they’re clearly industry rags rather than academic journals. I must admit I have a hard time picturing an academic journal on screenwriting — I think it would end up containing historical research rather than scientific principles because I don’t entirely believe there ARE any scientific principles in screenwriting. The Robert McKee / Syd Field approach is about as “scientific” as it gets, and much of the time those guys are just passing off opinion as fact or industry norms as universal principles. (Also, Field is a horrible writer, who apparently thinks “sets up” is one word: “setsup”, which sounds like a SAUCE.) Most of the gurubooks contain some insights I find useful, so I do read them, but I think it’s wise to take what resonates for you and discard the rest.
(For instance, I think knowledge of mythic structure is fantastic to have at the back of your mind as you’re shaping a story, but it’s a terrible point to start from, and no guarantee of anything, as George Lucas’ extremely variable storywork on his STAR WARS saga shows. I think Umberto Eco’s essay on CASABLANCA maybe gives a better clue to the success of STAR WARS than Joseph Campbell — think of it as a mass restyling of clichés rather than a New Myth for Our Age. Mythic structure starts from the point of universally recognisable archetypes, which is really the same as stereotypes. Whereas I’d rather start with real human qualities and then maybe connect them to myth as I go.)
I just don’t think there’s a science to study, so what we’re left with is criticism, which isn’t something you can pilot a spaceship on, as this blog probably proves. Writers work on a combination of craft and instinct: a competent beginner can learn craft, but you can’t make it work for you worth a damn without the right instincts — which you can develop by writing a lot, if they’re there in the first place.
It’s very good that there are so many screenplays available online now, and many many books on screenwriting to pick and choose pearls of wisdom from (while hopefully discarding all the plastic beads of received wisdom).
Incidentally, the book that sparked Preston Sturges’ glorious writing career was A Study of the Drama by Brander Matthews. The differences between stage and screen-writing are so obvious as to scarcely need enumeration, so I’m wondering what gems it contains… it seems to be a little expensive to pick up secondhand though.
So — am attempting to find something to say about every film I watch, so that puts a little pressure on to react to the Coens’ latest offering, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.
There are three broad kinds of reaction folks can have to the Coens’ oevre:
1) Liking the films. I was basically in this camp until INTOLERABLE CRUELTY and THE LADYKILLERS, which seemed to mark a colossal decline, and which incidentally were the first films the Coens had made using other people’s source material, a process which has continued with NCFOM, a fairly faithful adaptation, by most accounts, of Cormac McCarthy’s novel. (An earlier adaptation of James “Deliverance” Dickey’s To The White Sea failed to find backing, leading to the present cycle of films.) Previously, I had tended to find that I liked each film a little less than the one before, the decline starting after RAISING ARIZONA. So I am now in category 2 –
2) Liking some and not others. Since some Coen Bros films have been big box office hits and some have been flops, maybe most of the film-viewing western world is in this category. But it always puzzled me, since the sensibility on display is so consistent. If you liked FARGO, why wouldn’t you like THE BIG LEBOWSKI? (Up until this current release, Coens films with short titles have consistently done better than ones with longer). There is a recognisable Coens attitude (they like to appear smarter than their characters) as well as a set of self-conscious motifs (which the brothers like to point out, helpfully: weird hair, blustering titans, vomiting, fat men screaming) and a self-conscious visual style (toned-down slightly in FARGO and NO COUNTRY). But it’s now clear to me that not only are a couple of the Coens films markedly inferior, compromised works, but that I am becoming slightly less enamoured of the whole Coens vibe, leading my position ALMOST to border on category 3 –
3) Those who don’t like the films. While Coens detractors may admit that the films are well-made, even stylish, and the brothers certainly have some flair for dialogue, the argument against tends to centre on a certain lack of feeling. The Coens like to write about dumb people doing dumb things, often with a high mayhem factor in the outcome. At the same time, the writing-directing-producing-editing team are keen to show off how smart they are, with showy film technique, extravagant dialogue and cultural references — several Coens films are overt pastiches, almost amounting to plagiarism, of the styles and stories of James M. Cain (BLOOD SIMPLE), Dashiell Hammett (MILLER’S CROSSING) and Raymond Chandler (THE BIG LEBOWSKI), while OH BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? fuses various scenes and satiric approaches from Preston Sturges’ SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS onto the narrative of Homer’s Odyssey.
This tendency to set themselves up as superior to their characters is quite objectionable to some, but while I detect its presence and admit that’s what’s going on, it never bothered me too much. Whether the Coens have contempt for their characters, or love them, *I* like H.I. and the Dude and Marge, which is enough for me. I also see the Coens as working primarily in a comic register, even in an apparently serious flick like BLOOD SIMPLE or MILLER’S CROSSING, so the use of slightly dopey characters is a genre convention and comedy device that I can’t particularly object to. It’s apt that the Coens finally referenced Preston Sturges, who has a similarly aloof relationship to his characters, although I think it’s clearer that he sympathises with them (and also, he doesn’t inflict gory violence upon any of them, except in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS and the imaginary sequences of UNFAITHFULLY YOURS — come to think of it, he’s gorier than any contemporaneous comedy director).
Seeing the C-Bros as comedy filmmakers may reduce the obnoxiousness somewhat, but it perhaps becomes a problem in their latest, which isn’t overtly hilarious at any point. Despite its dramatic surface, as David Ehrenstein has argued, the film more or less continuously puts the spectator at an advantage over the characters: we generally know they’re going to die long before they do. Using dramatic irony or poignancy is a standard thriller device, but it’s unusual to see protagonists as continually predictable as this. The film generates surprise more by throwing in random plot developments (a car-crash from out of the blue) and violations of genre and narrative conventions (major characters eliminated off-screen, villains unpunished) than by interesting character psychology.
So, if the film is not consistently funny, what is the point of this God’s-eye view of the characters? The ironic distance seems more a matter of habit or compulsion than a necessary approach to the story. The Coens have never cared for theme, or making a point, or teaching a lesson, or even putting over a world view: their films are too filtered through books and other movies to comment directly on any form of reality. They are interested purely in story, in tall tales which feature surprising twists, tone shifts and genre-bending — the films are fairy tales, devoted to the plot and nothing but the plot.
(Javier Bardem’s unpronounceable psychopath in NO COUNTRY is a near-supernatural monster, implacable and seemingly impervious to pain. Tommy Lee Jones’ dream of his approaching death at the end seems intended to turn the story to some kind of semi-baked allegory, with J.B. as Death Incarnate in a page-boy haircut. The Coens’ fairytale world has made earlier use of such folkloric figures: an angel and demon in THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse in RAISING ARIZONA, and just about everybody in OH BROTHER…?)
It’s not surprising that NO COUNTRY, like FARGO, comes to centre on a suitcase full of money — the ultimate empty MacGuffin, a motivating object that require no explanation at all, and can disappear from the story once it has inspired enough carnage. The film, like previous Coen Brothers projects, is essentially about nothing.*
SO — if I’m starting to like the Coens less, it’s not because I object to their tone, it’s simply because, with each stylish, empty film, they seem to repeat themselves a little more, and it doesn’t feel like they can become more interesting unless they take a giant step and actually engage with something in the real world that they care about, if such a thing exists.
*
Footnote: Kelly MacDonald is really good in this film. Hardly anybody has mentioned her in reviews, but I think her journey as an actress has been considerable: barely acceptable in TRAINSPOTTING, frequently mis-stressed her lines. Gradually rising to full adequacy, she has now surpassed that status with a rather strong, touching performance. She deserves more recognition for it, since it’s been achieved (after her first lucky break) through sheer hard work. (Plus I’ve met her and she’s really nice.)
*See also: most of John Hodges’ scripts for Danny Boyle. SHALLOW GRAVE, TRAINSPOTTING and A LIFE LESS ORDINARY all revolve around cases of cash!
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.
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.
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:
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FILM | Tagged: Preston Sturges, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, The Diaries of Major Thompson, Unfaithfully Yours | 
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