Publishing…

I seem to have written a novel, entitled THEY USED DARK FORCES. Amazon is currently in the process of publishing it.

More soon… above is a teaser video by the estimable Danny Carr.

UPDATE: it’s here.

The Pan

Don Siegel is one of the best sources for Anatole Litvak stories in his memoir, A Siegel Film.

There’s quite a lot about Siegel’s montages for BLUES IN THE NIGHT, which a big part of that film. In one yarn, both Litvak (producer as well as director) and Hal Wallis (production supervisor) expect to see the montages first. Siegel is simply going to project the rushes for both men, but he’s advised if he does that, one of them will feel compelled to nitpick and his beautiful work will be undone. So he books two screening rooms, prints two prints, and Wallis and Litvak happily watch separately, giving the montages the OK. Now read on:

Later, when Litvak was dubbing the picture, he told me that he was
worried about the title song, ‘Blues in the Night’.

ME: I wouldn’t worry about that. It’s the best blues I’ve ever heard. If I
were you, I’d worry about your picture, which is five per cent as
good as the song . . .
LITVAK: (Annoyed) You think you’re pretty good, don’t you Don?
ME: (Fresh as usual) You said some pretty nice things about the
montages.
LITVAK: True, but when you dolly into the poster you could have had
someone walk past the poster. And you should have started on
that person and ended on the poster. You must always have a
reason for your camera movement, be it a dolly or a pan.
And you know something, he was right. He taught me a lesson I used for
the rest of my life.

I’m not always certain how truthful Siegel’s stories are. His recounting of the circumstances in which Barbara Steele departed the production of FLAMING STAR disagrees with hers’, and while Barbara might equally well be distorting the facts, her version MAKES SENSE, portrays both of them IN CHARACTER, and of the two of them, he seems to be the one who might have motivation to rearrange the facts to make himself look better.

But the above anecdote rings true, partly because it describes just the kind of shot Litvak is always doing. For instance, CITY FOR CONQUEST begins with a train coming towards us — it passes — and the camera is led, in apparently panning after it, onto a sign that serves as establishing shot:

ACT OF LOVE pulls off a more elaborate variation. We start on a passing train, seen from above. That pulls the camera round in a leftward pan to a road, at eye level, along which a bus advances. Now the lens is gravitationally tugged into another leftward pan by the bus, and we land on a piece of expressive graffiti which serves as a different kind of establishing shot, a sociopolitical one:

It’s close to a 360 pan, but operating on two levels, down at the railway track and up at the road.

This example is arguably a little fancy, but Litvak’s lesson is a good one! You can use people and other moving objects such as vehicles to motivate the camera moves you want to do anyway.

Angles and Dirty Phases

A striking inverted angle from CASTLE ON THE HUDSON

Lesser Litvaks —

CASTLE ON THE HUDSON is a remake of Curtiz’s 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING, which I’ve never seen, though the title fascinated me as a kid. I ought to do a compare-and-contrast. I found this one a bit by-the-numbers with John Garfield as a Cagney clone. (He’s better as a complete swine in OUT OF THE FOG, his other role for this director.) It’s got a lot of punch, but lacks Litvak’s usual fluidity: too many close-ups.

It really comes alive, though, during the few minutes when Burgess Meredith comes in takes it by the throat. I’m guessing Litvak admired OF MICE AND MEN since he snapped up Burgess here and Betty Field for BLUES IN THE NIGHT.

CITY FOR CONQUEST —

“That was a book by Aben Kandel that was quite successful at the time, a book very difficult to adapt into a motion picture, because it dealt with
as enormous a city as New York is I was fascinated by the book, and had a terrible feeling, a kind of horrible ambition, about doing a picture about the city of New York that I was so terribly· impressed with from the moment I came here. It was a challenge to me, because basically I still was quite a foreigner at that time. I spent quite a while in New York, just for my basic acquaintance with the city, and the people of the city, before I started on the story.”

Writer Aben Kandel came to my attention for his involvement as screenwriter in the rather drole SING AND LIKE IT (1934) but later was mixed up in TROG and CRAZE, two ghastly low-budget horror affairs made in Britain. How he descended from being an acclaimed novelist to that dreck is an unknown but no doubt depressing story.

CITY FOR CONQUEST stars the actual Cagney, along with Ann Sheridan again, and a young and unusually appealing Arthur Kennedy. Plus Elia frickin’ Kazan, during his brief stint as a Warners character player. Both his big roles were for Litvak (BLUES IN THE NIGHT is the other) and he tears up the screen. But all the characters are from stock, and typecast accordingly. One is happy to see Frank McHugh as a sidekick, but not exactly surprised. Warners specialised in cramming the screen with yammering cut-outs, but somehow in this case thing feel thin.

Cagney & Kazan!

Cagney threw himself into training to play a boxer and really felt they were adapting a great book, but he was bitterly disappointed by the end result. “I worked like a dog on City for Conquest,” he wrote, or dictated, in Cagney By Cagney, “There were some excellent passages in Kandel’s novel, and all of us doing the picture realized that retaining them (as we were doing) would give City for Conquest distinction. Then I saw the final cut of the picture, and this was quite a surprise. The studio had edited out the best scenes in the picture, excellent stuff, leaving only the novel’s skeleton. What remained was a trite melodrama.”

He’s not wrong. Worse, you can see the trailing stumps of scenes and characters that clearly needed further development for the thing to make structural sense. Frank Craven as “the old timer” is set up as a Greek chorus, an old hobo who talks to the camera, but he only appears a couple of times. I think a lot of it might still have been corny, but it could have hung together.

Litvak: “I was crazy about Jimmy Cagney, and Warner Bros. was crazy about him because he was a big star. This is for the first time when Jimmy Cagney played the part of a weak man. As you know, Jimmy Cagney mostly played — particularly at that time — tough guys, dominating tough guys. I thought — I always felt– that Jimmy was a great actor, and didn’t have to do this stereotyped kind of a fellow, this gangster he had played for years. I came with this proposition to Warners and finally they accepted it. I found that Jimmy Cagney was a bit scared of this picture. I would say that in all my career this was one of the few times when I had trouble with an actor. I explain it to myself as a strange feeling Jimmy had about the part. He was not quite sure what he was doing. But I must say that I feel (and I think the public agreed with me too, and the critics) that it was probably one of the
best things Jimmy Cagney did on the screen.”

Maybe Cagney just didn’t have the weakness in him? What co-star could convincingly intimidate him?

Cagney did ruefully note the picture’s box office success, but strongly implies that the public was wrong. I am unable to find an original source for the star’s description of Litvak as “a natural born asshole,” but going by both men’s recollections it does seem quite possible that he said it at some time. Cagney always admitted to being difficult, but only when he was trying to give a good performance and felt he was being hampered.

Interesting that Litvak doesn’t mention the film’s truncation, which he SHOULD have been unhappy about, since the mutilation is hardly invisible.

Cagney as the blinded boxer redeems it a little with his convincing physicality both as prize-fighter (his dancing background pays off) and blinded newsie — he really tries to look properly, unphotogenically disabled. And Kazan is a knockout. He’s obviously intended to form the fourth corner of a structure that interleaves Cagney, Sheridan and Kennedy’s struggles, and the reduction of his role is really frustrating because he’s so bloody good, damn him.

“I coulda been a contender, Tola…”

I’m not sure if anyone ever asked Kazan about working for Litvak. He must have learned SOMETHING about screen acting from the experience.

CASTLE ON THE HUDSON stars Porfirio Diaz; Nora Prentiss; Hildy Johnson; The Penguin; Miles Archer; Kewpie Blain; Carson Drew; Lady Macduff; Danny Leggett; Pete Daggett; Michael Axford; Bim; Detective Bates; Egeus – Father to Hermia; Louie the Lug; Dr. Leonardo; Noah Joad; and Cueball.

CITY FOR CONQUEST stars George M. Cohan; Nora Prentiss; Jackson Bentley; Battling Burrows; Asa Timberlake; ‘Spud’ Connors; ‘Pusher’ Ross; Nickie Haroyen; Alexis Zorba; Effie Perine; Madame Therese De Farge; Dixie Belle Lee; Inspector Crane; Detective Bates; El Gringo; Bim; The Obtrusive Gentleman; Max Jacobs; and Cueball.