It’s not blood, it’s red

Watched two Vincente Minnellis this week, without having planned it. BELLS ARE RINGING (top) was a rewatch. The combination of the timeless and simple source material — Cinderella — clever-clever screenwriter/songwriters (Comden & Green) — a crazed aesthete for a director — and the comedy powerhouse that is Judy Holliday — make this one that shouldn’t be missed if you like any of those kind of things.

We’d never seen LUST FOR LIFE. We didn’t initially take to Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh, although he certainly looks the part. He rants a lot, and it feels like the usual Kirk schtick amped up to eleven, rather than anything new or insightful. We admitted the thing was extremely beautiful. We pondered at the fact that Vincent’s letters to Theo (James Donald) were read on the soundtrack by Donald, not Douglas.

Slowly, the film gets better, or its better qualities come to dominate. Donald is the emotional centre, the one who can enlist our sympathies most strongly, so that’s why he gets the VO. And there’s more going on with the imagery than “just” beauty or even an attempt to mimic the look of specific Van Gogh paintings.

When VVG, close to his first crack-up, sits in a gloomy bar, Minnelli shows us his tormented face and then his POV.

We don’t know yet that Minnelli plans to use the image of the lamp as a symbol for when VVG’s mind overheats. It returns later, precipitating the ear-lopping.

What it does here, instead, is suggests the artist’s ability to find beauty in unexpected circumstances. Combined with Kirk’s glowering features, it suggests that he’s oppressed by this ability.

And then the ravishing landscapes, the film’s incessant picturesqueness, start to take on an added value. They go by too fast for us to really study them, seize them with our minds. We feel like the artist, struggling to capture fleeting beauty before it vanishes forever. (No replay function for real life.)

The lantern having assumed a prominent role, Minnelli can simply pan away onto it when VVG is about to make with the straight razor. Exactly as Tarantino does in RESERVOIR DOGS.

Lacking the ability to make Kirk’s ear disappear, Minnelli has to simply avoid shooting him on one side after the bandages come off.

Fiona remembers her art teacher inveighing against Don McLean’s song Vincent and its bogus sentimentality. I remember my art teacher answering a question about why VVG cut his ear off with the line, “He wanted to see what it looked like.” Quite a logical answer. He was an artist, he painted self-portraits… Not true though.

Kirk quietens down in some scenes. James Donald continues to quietly engage. Anthony Quinn brings the entertainment, and doesn’t overact. And he makes things a bit less formal.

The ending had an unexpected emotional impact, especially for Fiona, bringing back her feelings at her own brother’s death. “My poor brother,” says Theo, which is simple and absolutely right. What else can you say?

We’re inclined to look at some more cinematic Vincents. There are lots! The Richard Curtis Dr. Who episode is the worst thing ever, though — way beyond Don McLean.

Escapism

It’s true that Netflix has a lousy classic film selection, except that there are some oddities like EROTIKON and some commedia al’Italia you would expect to find, which we should be thankful for.

But I clicked on THE GREAT ESCAPE because I was in the mood for the smooth and unchallenging. I intended just to watch a little bit, but it’s been ages since I ran it and of course I ended up watching the whole thing. It’s kind of perfect. Of course, it shows war as being schoolboy fun, but escaping from a German POW camp — unlike suffering in a Japanese one — probably had aspects of being at school. Plotting to defeat the system was likely to be fun, with an undercurrent of terror.

We had to pause it at what felt like twenty minutes in, but turned out to be forty-nine minutes in. That’s how smoothly and efficiently and entertainingly it goes.

Elmer Bernstein’s theme is great, but all his scoring is great — when he’s not doing the march or the snare-drum suspense, he does oddly beautiful and tender things for Steve McQueen and Angus Lennie, or James Garner and Donald Pleasence. Harp arpeggios — well, we know he was a Bernard Herrmann fan. Did John Sturges temp-track these bits with tracks from Herrmann’s score for his own UNDERWATER? Probably not. (NB DEFINITELY not: see comments.) The only thing I’d question is the sudden happy music introducing fresh scenes right after tragic ones — but I bet they thought about that very seriously, and decided they couldn’t smooth things over, they had to make hard transitions to let everything play out with its full value.

Lots of Scots in this — four of them, to be precise, meaning that you rarely get a scene without some Scottish presence. James Donald and David McCallum have suppressed it, of course, but Angus Lennie and Gordon Jackson let it all hang out, and do a song and dance about it. Weird that Lennie, who’s magnificent, and John Leyton, who’s blander but very sympathetic, didn’t capitalize on this to find fame and fortune.

I like to think Leyton and McCallum meet up for regular cast reunions, the only ones left.

Ward Bonds

 

Watching WHITE CORRIDORS, (1951) directed by Pat Jackson (Miss Jackson if you’re nasty), was slightly annoying due to a defective copy that kept drifting out of sync. Fortunately, VLC Media Player has a handy function that lets you adjust, but every five minutes I had to nudge the sound half a second forward, which would put it very slightly ahead, and wait until it got behind again and then nudge it forward again… If the film hadn’t been so engrossing I would definitely have given up.

The movie has no direct connection with Jackson’s later THE GENTLE/FEMININE TOUCH, but it’s another hospital soap opera, following a diverse group of doctors and nurses and their patients through the day. Googie Withers plays a surgeon, and no issue is made of her femininity, other than the question of whether she’ll stay at this midlands backwater to be near her research scientist lover James “Madness!” Donald, or go to London where the action is. She’s in danger of being passed over for promotion here in favour of head surgeon Godfrey Tearle’s smarmy son (champion smarmster Jack Watling). Petula Clark plays a probationary nurse struggling through her first day. Like a lot of British films of the period, the movie eschews a lead character in favour of celebrating community, which has the effect of diffusing close identification somewhat, but gives us a more global view of the story world.

 

One terrifying masterstroke: a little boy (beautifully played by actual little boy Brand Inglis) has been admitted with an infected wound: we’re about to discover that his septicemia does not respond to antibiotics. He’s drawing, and his hands begin to shake. He stares at them, uncomprehendingly.

Then Barker cuts to the nursing staff, but with the kid’s bed visible in the foreground. And his tray begins to shake, uncontrollably. But nobody notices (considerable anxiety/horror is created by this) until the lid falls off a tin on his tray.

This and several other plot strands don’t develop in the expected soap opera ways. When a nurse tells on a negligent medico (her former lover), the other “sympathetic” characters turn on her. There’s a bit of dangerous socialist propaganda about the merits of the National Health Service (Yay!) and some satire of the red tape non-emergency cases still have to struggle with. OK, I’m satisfied that Jackson was a reliable talent with flashes of real cinematic dazzle. Now I have to dig into his early wartime work.

Petula and Bernard Lee. Know him anywhere.

Stars Rose Sandigate; Theo Van Gogh; Sharon McLonergan; Kreacher; Lady Winterbourne;  Mrs Grose; ‘M’, Charters; Melanthius; Dickie Winslow; Becky Driscoll; and Mrs Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone;