Another weird-ass dream. My friend Robert has come round one evening, along with another friend, Mark Bender (in reality the two don’t know each other and Mark is in the US right now) and Steven Spielberg is there too. I think Spielberg is the first person to notice that, although the night sky is perforated with bright stars, as you approach the window they become grey smudges, then cheerful pastel blobs. Then we notice that the building across the street looks like the one in NOSFERATU, and that there’s a guy in the window there who looks like Wilford Brimley. General jubilation.
Photographs are taken, and soon the window is wide open and Robert is sitting on the sill, legs dangling over a three-storey drop. I think to myself, “I should warn him to be careful there,” and at that instant, his buttocks slide off the sill and he drops silently from view.
A frozen moment of sickening horror, and then Mark charges to the window and impulsively vaults out into space. Does he hope to catch Bob on the way down? Spielberg and I exchange a startled glance then rush over and look down.
I remember a statistic I just read — in any fall of more than two storeys, your chances of death are at least 50%. I can’t remember where I read this, and in fact it may have been in another dream.
Down on the pavement, Mark is getting gingerly to his feet and staggering about, looking for Robert. But Robert cannot be seen.
We run downstairs. Spielberg, the big film genius, is as big an idiot as I, since neither of us has called an ambulance or even grabbed a phone. We find Mark, still hobbling, with perhaps many small broken bones in his feet, still looking for Robert. Robert is nowhere to be seen.
As I am waking up, I come up with a solution to the mystery, but I’ll only put it in the comments section after hearing your own suggestions.
Regular Shadowplayer Jenny wrote this in our Comments section:
‘This is off-topic but I wanted to know your opinion on the DVD-market in Britain. After 10 years in this format are we getting a good choice of films?’
First, I have to ask, relative to what? I’m cheered by the fact that there’s more films available, and more good ones, on DVD than were ever accessible on VHS, and the quality is generally much better (pan-and-scan is almost becoming extinct). On the other hand, the selection in America seems to be much better (plus the U.S. has the wonder that is Turner Classic Movies — the British equivalent is a pale and simpering shadow of the mighty stateside behemoth). So the situation could still stand monstro improving.
‘I rent from lovefilm.com and often find it galling that they don’t have more international and older films available to rent - they do seem to have everything that is available on region 2 but it doesn’t seem enough.’
It definitely isn’t. (NOTHING IS EVER ENOUGH!) I may actually be getting near the dregs of what I want to rent in this country, even though new stuff keeps coming out.
There IS a sorta-solution for British residents, but it doesn’t involve renting, and depending on how far you take it, it could get… illegal.
First, you need a multi-region player. These are just as cheap as single-region ones, sometimes even cheaper (they actually ADD something to the DVD player to make it single region only). You can also find online hacks for most DVD players that actually convert them to multi-region, easy as π.
Then you buy from Amazon.com. You can already buy from Amazon.fr, Amazon.de etc, since European discs use the same region coding as the UK. Once you’ve watched the film you can sell it on eBay, so the cost ends up being relatively low.
Now comes the illegal bit. With free software like DVD Decrypter, DVD Shrink, combined with the more expensive Nero, it’s possible to copy every film you buy or rent. I’m not suggesting you do this as IT IS WRONG. Bruce Willis and Jeffrey Katzenberg will wind up BEGGING IN THE STREETS if you do this. Could you live with yourself?
It could be argued that ripping movies that aren’t available in the UK is a way to correct a problem in the marketplace, where a demand isn’t being met, or prices are too high. But it’s a slippery slope. Once you start ripping you may find it hard to stop.
So don’t do that. But the buying from abroad thing is legal, and you’ll be helping out others by re-selling what you buy.
It’s great if you’re interested in getting French movies without English subs, because (a) you can learn a lot of storytelling technique from watching films where you don’t understand the dialogue and (b) if you speak French, then a whole new set of nuances in the dialogue will be open to you, and also (c) you’ll be able to see lots of great French films that aren’t available anywhere with English subtitles, like theseweirdthings.
Jenny also said:
‘Recently I emailed [Lovefilm] to ask if they could start renting out films from other regions but make it clear that they don’t have English subtitles. As always with their customer services they emailed back some piece of the terms and conditions that they think has something to do with my query but doesn’t actually answer it at all (many businesses seem to communicate in the same way as an MP these days). So I clicked “No this doesn’t answer my question” and tried again. This time they came back with “We only rent out region 2 DVDs”. But hang on, this is a suggestion from a customer - at least say you’re going to put it in a suggestion box. Pretend! This is called running a business! So I don’t know if it’s illegal or if they don’t work in UK DVD players.’
Generally a DVD distributor only has the rights for a certain set of territories, so it wouldn’t be legal for a U.S. or a French DVD to be offered for rental in the U.K. But if Lovefilm are failing to give you this information, keep hassling them — I think unhelpful customer service should be repaid in kind by obstreperous customers who refuse to give up.
My favourite Lovefilm moment is when they suddenly increased their databse by about a thousand, and were offering films for rent like THE CASE OF LENA SMITH, which not only is unavailable on DVD anywhere in the world, it’s actually a LOST FILM — only fragments survive.
‘If small, critically acclaimed films that I read about don’t make it on to DVD and TV continues to ignore films I literally have no chance of watching them.’
The issue of British TV’s slide into a completely insular world that ignores art cinema is a really serious one which I should blog about soon.
‘I also think that great directors should have all their films released on DVD - with smaller production of their less-popular work. I think they have managed this with Hitchcock but not with many others.’
I totally agree. One consequence of having a filmmaker’s entire oeuvre available is that even the weaker films become more interesting when you can see them all together. And yet at present in the UK you can’t even see every Spielberg film.
I understand that with a filmmaker like Akira Kurosawa, who was both long-lived and prolific, and who worked for more than one studio, gathering all the rights together at one DVD distributor would be tough. And while servicing movie buffs who want to see all Otto Preminger’s movies, Hollywood studios also want to keep fans happy who are more interested in movie stars, so for instance RIVER OF NO RETURN may get a release ahead of DAISY KENYON, even if it’s not as interesting, purely because it has Monroe.
Then there are commendable outfits like the womderful Criterion and Masters of Cinema, which exist to deliver the creme de la creme of film culture, and which therefore don’t go in for complete filmographies.
Where a filmmaker has made a relatively small number of films, it would be nice if they were all made available by SOMEBODY. There’s a Clouzot box set, but it doesn’t contain many of his films. Masaki Kobayashi was far from prolific, but most of his stuff is still not obtainable in the west, and hardly any in the UK. Of Von Sternberg’s 22 existing, complete features, about half are not available, including all his silent films (although a few of these WERE released on VHS).
For all these reasons and more, the capitalist system doesn’t serve the discerning film lover very well, even if it did allow many of the great films to get made in the first place. (BUT — free BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN in today’s Guardian).
All images from Henri-Georges Clouzot’s LA PRISONNIERE (not available in the US or UK, not available with English subtitles ANYWHERE).
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.
Since I’ve been going on about faces rather a lot (more on BODIES, soon), I couldn’t very well fail to mention this little chap, Aleksei Kravchenko, in COME AND SEE, which I re-saw recently at a screening I put on at Screen Academy Scotland.
(Screening this film is problematic: I was approached by more than one person with the question, “What are you showing tonight?” and when I replied, “Come and See,” they’d say, “But what are you showing?” and the whole thing turned into a protracted Abbott & Costello routine.)
Elem Klimov’s astonishingly powerful and horrific WWII movie is another of those films which is relentlessly dark and negative, but never becoems depressing. One emerges glad to be alive. A big part of the film’s power comes from the extraordinary central performance by young Kravchenko, whose commitment to the role of a young partisan fighting the Nazis in Belarus was so strong that Klimov and his crew feared for the boy’s sanity. Although Klimov’s humanitarian impulses were not strong enough to prevent him from, like William Wellman in his 30s gangster films, using live ammo…
Anyhow, the face is eloquent, what I call a PROFOUND FACE, and the performance powerful, and at times Kravchenko looks like a bad drawing (like I might draw) of my nephew Calum, which also intensifies my emotional responses… although what we really get is the Universal Face of Suffering Humanity, filtered through the specifics of a single person’s features.
The makeup is also hugely important, as the hero’s shattering experiences gradually give him the weathered face of an old man…
Klimov’s wife, Larissa Shepitko, directed THE ASCENT, which is maybe the ultimate film about the Eastern Front, whereas Klimov’s movie is more of a descent into Hell than an altogether realistic portrait of a campaign, but the effect is of an engrossing psychological realism, with the commitment to P.O.V. maintained relentlessly: when the boy is deafened by exploding shells, the soundtrack is engulfed by a droning, ringing tinnitus effect that continues, slowly fading, for the next half hour of screen time. Compared to this, those moments in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN where Tom Hanks’ hearing is affected are like the Tom & Jerry version.
Klimov’s heavy use of steadicam reminds me of another film of sweeping movement towards death, acts of violence we don’t want to see but are driven ineluctably towards: the BBC play ELEPHANT, written by Bernard MacLaverty, directed by Alan Clarke.
A friend of mine worked on a big “Making of” documentary about 70s fish-based megahit JAWS. I won’t repeat what he told me about how Spielberg supposedly lost his virginity because I can’t afford a lawyer, but he was very interesting about the shark itself.
You all know the story: the mechanical shark built for the film malfunctioned constantly. “I was forced into making those creative choices, because I didn’t have a shark to use.”
Well, as my contact says, “We were told, by more than one person, that the mechanical shark worked fine. I mean, it looked like what it was, a fake shark, but it did everything it was supposed to do. The reason for the delays was that some high-up production personnel had acquired girlfriends on location and were in no hurry to return home.”
I just wanted to get that out there, true of not, in memory of the poor chap who built Bruce the Shark, (he also did the giant squid in Disney’s TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA) who’s had decades of people thinking his shark didn’t go. Doesn’t seem fair.
On William Cameron Menzies’ INVADERS FROM MARS: ‘Whew, that movie just, it just undid my world… because it got to a primal place which basically says that the first people not to trust is your father and mother.’
When Worlds Undo!
‘That’s a shattering, primal attack on all of us when we went to see this movie. But I went to see this movie five times, because I kept expecting the parents not to turn against the kid. Somehow — I was like, eleven or ten years old when I saw it the movie — I thought, “Well, maybe the fourth time I see it the parents will be nice.” I was like thinking that maybe film is like that, film, you know, doesn’t, isn’t a set story locked in cement, but it can actually change.’
Word for the day: primal. Halfway through the above he obviously hits on a silly lie and decides to tell it because it’ll make a ‘great story.’ I don’t believe Spielberg was that dumb at ten. It’s taken him years to get that dumb.
‘I think Menzies gave himself the license to do some very Bertolt Brechtian sets, because it was a dream. And only he knew that, the audience didn’t know that.’
He says ’Brechtian’ when he means expressionistic, or else he doesn’t KNOW what he means. Humm. The time has come for me to point out what I’m sure you’ve all noticed already but just been too polite to say: nothing Spielberg says makes any sense.
‘What really unseats you as a child when you see that movie, at the very end it’s all a dream.’
I don’t recall INVADERS FROM MARS unseating me as a child.
He wasn’t always this incoherent. I seem to recall some sensible utterances in the past, and he can still just about manage a sentence that hangs together when he’s talking about his work, which after all he should know something about, but most of the time he’s just painful:
On THE SPACE CHILDREN: ‘You would just think that if our parents are going to destroy the world, children would never do that, because we really have all the tools of tolerance and, like, global understanding and that’s why we, the children, need to be empowered, to tell the parents what they need to know to protect all of us, as a whole. And that’s what that movie kind of was saying at the end.’
Kind of. It’s like his head is a big tombola and random crap just comes tumbling out.
‘Every science fiction movie I have ever seen, any one that’s worth its weight in celluloid, warns us about things that ultimately come true.’
Yeah, like remember when 2001 came out and now you can’t move for monoliths?
‘A director is first and foremost a storyteller before everything else. And to tell a story you have got to have, you know, access to be able to move things around in — not just in your world, but in your life.’
Pieces of brain tissue are flaking off with every word he says.
‘What you see is what I can pretty much interpret through me from what the writer writes, because I have always said that without a screenplay, without a story, without a writer we have nothing.’
You said it.
‘Yes, it’s actually good to be a director and not know who the director is.’
WHAAAAA?
‘I do as much homework, I like to think, as the actors do when they come to meet me halfway.’
Halfway? I think S.S. has a tendency to witter on for a bit, then find that one word of what he says intersects with a well-known phrase or saying, so he just throws that in, regardless of whether it actually means anything.
On SCHINDLER’S LIST: ‘I think it’s the most honest acquittal of a subject by taking my own impulses to upstage the subject, and where I force myself into the background of the subject matter. And I think that’s the first time I’ve ever done that before and I think it really benefited the movie.’
The last sentence would be fine without that rogue “before” in there, but the first one? I think even he doesn’t know what he means by “acquittal”, and then, if I read him correctly, he starts by saying the exact opposite of what he means, then says something that I sort of get, but which conjures up the weird image of Spielberg in baseball cap standing in the backgroundof SCHINDLER’S LIST, as if doing a Hitchcockian walk-0n.
Is it just because he’s so big and powerful nobody in his life can stand up and say, ‘Hang about, Steve, that doesn’t make sense,’? Ifonlyifonlyifonly somebody had said that when he proposed the wretched HAUNTING remake he produced, with the words ‘It’s a great opportunity to use digital effects!’ Is this why all his movies now overshoot their endings and drag on for a superfluous half hour?
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Uncategorized | Tagged: dreams, Mark Bender, Nosferatu, Spielberg, Wilford Brimley | 
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