Rashomon Amour

Fiona was VERY taken with Kay Kendall’s drunk scene in LES GIRLS. I was too, but also taken aback. We’ve all learned, supposedly, to be more sensitive and thus to be a touch affronted at Hollywood’s flip treatment of alcoholism. But I find I’m rarely that bothered by Arthur Housman doing his detailed dipso routine in Laurel & Hardy films. Kendall playing a solitary drinker who gets riotously blotto a la Judith Hearne is a bit stronger. But she does play it magnificently.

Lots to enjoy in this one, even if George Cukor could never be bothered staging his own musical numbers: here he passes them to Jack Cole, so they’re in safe hands.

It’s all a meditation on the nature of truth and the elusiveness of reality, conducted by MGM. Like RASHOMON with better songs. Although not many of the numbers are that memorable — the set design makes the biggest splash when Gene Kelly pastiches Brando in THE WILD ONE.

 

It’s Kelly’s last real Hollywood musical leading man role, and already he’s somewhat sidelined: you might think making him the object of desire for three glamorous women (Kendall, Mitzi Gaynor and the more obscure Taina Elg, who is actually very good despite the Scrabble-score name — “She’s got a great LOOK!” diagnosed Fiona — some credit belongs to Orry Kelly here). The narrative emerges via three competing testimonies in a libel case, which ought by rights to be delivered by les girls, but Kelly still had enough clout to elbow Gaynor out the way and deliver the denouement himself.

A sexy masterstroke by the naughty Orry — backless dresses that manage to make perfectly decent leggings look as rude as bare bottoms ~

The story is by Vera Caspary of LAURA fame, who must deserve some of the credit for the waspish dialogue. Brandishing a placard at us declaring WHAT IS TRUTH?, the  movie can seem at times too impressed with its own cleverness — a religious sandwich-board would be unlikely to quote Pontius Pilate, methinks — but it’s tastefully lavish, oddball and hugely entertaining, which is what we wanted over the festive period.

Last Christmas Fiona had acute depression, anxiety, horrible medication side-effects, and we both had flu and chronic insomnia and the cat was dying. This year Fiona only broke her ankle slightly so it can be considered a great improvement.

Another Fine Mesopotamian

Minnelli’s KISMET — for some reason Fiona was reluctant to watch this, despite being a confirmed fan of  choreographer Jack Cole and having enjoyed a ton of Minnelli recently. Maybe because she generally prefers his melodramas to his musicals. About ten minutes in she pronounced this “great” — maybe by the end it isn’t quite up there with the very top films of the Freed unit, but the witty lyrics, zesty playing, strong plot based around improbable reversals of fate, and some bracingly disrespectful use of Borodin results in something very enjoyable.

Weirdly, it starts out looking kind of cheap — interior exteriors often have that effect, however lavish they may be. The “Not Since Ninevah” number is a riot, and a moving mass of gaudily coloured costumes make the eye rattle around like a pinball, but it’s all happening against a Star Trek cyclorama in a sand pit.

What makes the film start looking suave is the slow fade to dusk and night — the story has an unusual 24 hr runtime and Minnelli takes the gradations of the day seriously — the later it gets, the more beautiful Joseph Ruttenberg’s cinematography becomes, and the better E. Preston Ames’ sets look.

Dick the First and His Eight Wives

LYDIA BAILEY — they needed to give it a dull title otherwise it would have been TOO EXCITING. The plot concerns the battle for independence in Haiti, into which Napoleon’s armies got mixed. The title character is the lovely Anne Francis, the nominal hero is Dale SON OF SINBAD Robertson who comes to get her to sign some papers to help sort out her father’s will (he’s left his fortune to the still-fragile United States), but Robertson’s mission is soon forgotten about (we never see the papers signed and I imagine he lost them around the time he jumped into the waterfall) as is Robertson, even when he’s onscreen. The star of the show is William BLACKULA Marshall in his first movie, as revolutionary warrior King Dick.

King Dick talks softly and carries a VERY big stick, and has eight wives, each a specialist in her own field — cooking, sewing, love-making, voodoo, and so on. He’s always singing the praises of polygamy — “One woman is too much, two are just about bearable, eight is ideal!” The movie, directed by Jean Negulesco in vivid colour, knows full well who the star is, and ends on a shot of King Dick rampant against a burning city.

At times it looks like the movie is going to forget about its new star and focus on beefcake breezeblock Dale Robertson, and only the delights of Anne Francis stave off ennui, but then King Dick springs up again and everything is hunky dory. He should really have had his own movie series: solving crimes; espionage; hitting things with his stick. The possibilities limited only by King Dick’s immenseness, which is to say that they are UNlimited.

Throughout all the luridness and camp excess, Negulesco keeps his camerawork relatively muted — and he was a director who certainly knew how to lunge into hysteria if required. I presume he deduced that in this case he could let the Technicolor, the unruly passions, and the general air of madness do all of that for him. He serves up the fervid antics with the nearest thing to understatement the film has to offer, apart from Marshall’s delivery, which is frequently drily drôle.

The film seems progressive not just because it has a major black character, but it also has different factions of Haitians, rather than treating them as a single unified mass. There’s the political leader, described as the nation’s George Washington, and there’s Juanita Moore, too, in a substantial yet uncredited role. 20th Century Fox’s crediting policy was obviously not as up-to-date as their storylines: Robert Evans gets a prominent cred for playing a nameless soldier, but black actors with major named characters get zip.

Maybe a decade or so later Robertson could have been left out of the movie altogether and we could have allowed chemistry between Anne Francis and Marshall (the movie tries hard to stop them ever appearing at once), which would be REALLY interesting. They’re both pretty potent.

The voodoo dance is directed by Jack Cole, who also appears, quite convincingly, in blackface (because there just aren’t any good black dancers, apparently). And the plot, less believably, has several characters smearing mud on themselves to pass as mulattos — I was waiting for Dale and Anne to dry out in the sun and start cracking and flaking.