Superstition Mountain

Fake mountain, real cinema. S. Sylvan Simon (and George Marshall) and LUST FOR GOLD, in this fortnight’s edition of The Forgotten, over at The Notebook.

Essays in Darkness

Got my copy of SO DARK THE NIGHT from Arrow. I wrote an essay for this one, and am delighted to be included in the package along with Farran Smith Nehme & Glenn Kenny (commentary track) and Imogen Sara Smith (video presentation). There was a delay in publication with this one so I’d completely forgotten what I’d written: I was relieved to find it not too shoddy. Peter Bogdanovich’s interview with Joseph H. Lewis was a great help, as was finding out a little about the credited screenwriters.

It’s a fine, offbeat noir and I recommend it. Funnily enough, I was just watching noir pixie Steven Geray in I LOVE TROUBLE (1948), an enjoyable Chandler knock-off helmed by S. Sylvan Simon and written by TV’s Roy Huggins (The Fugitive, The Rockford Files) where he was more typically cast as a louche club owner. If you’re used to seeing him do that kind of thing, Geray’s multiple departures from type in SO DARK will *astound* you.

So Dark The Night [Blu-ray]

In the playroom

So, we saw, and were very entertained by a film in which a young man meets his girlfriend’s wealthy family at their home. They include an authoritative dad and a drunken son. Something isn’t right. He starts to suspect he’s fallen into a terrible trap…

But I’m not talking about GET OUT, which we also enjoyed very much. Today’s topic is HOLIDAY, which I can’t believe I haven’t seen before, and which has now shot up to the top of my George Cukor list. What was there before? I’m not even sure. The problem with me, when you come right down to it, is that I probably didn’t have a George Cukor list at all.

This one is classed as a screwball comedy — while I realise that nothing is more boring or pointless than arguing about genre definitions. Screwball, apart from being quintessentially American and essentially mid-thirties to mid-forties, is really more like a collection of desirable items than a readily-defined genre. If you have enough of the items, as we do here (eccentric heiress, class barriers overcome, playful/childish behaviour asserted as a right) then it ought to qualify. But there’s also the indefinable, personal quality of what it feels like. And in a sense I felt the anxiety of the pressure to conform in HOLIDAY more strongly and consistently than I felt the joy of letting go. In a sense, the joy is intensified by the pressures around it, but the forces that are at work to make Cary Grant into a highly-paid wage slave and trophy husband are always on our minds.

Cary Grant gets to show off his expertise in tumbling with a series of spectacular back-flips. Katherine Hepburn is more vulnerable than usual, and makes it work. Lew Ayres is, my God, TERRIFIC — the heart and soul of the film, in a way. If the movie isn’t as well-known as the Hepburn-Cukor PHILADELPHIA STORY, also from a play by Philip Barry, it may because Ayres complicates it, makes it less than totally joyous. He’s a casualty of the household Hepburn and Grant have to escape, and we don’t really believe he’s ever going to be alright. So the happy ending, which is inevitable, is surprisingly compromised, undermined — elated, but with a scintilla of unease.

This movie makes me curious to see the 1930 original — it was an indecently-soon remake. Edward Everett Horton plays the same role in both versions (he’s marvelously understated, by his eccentric standards). I’m also curious about another Barry adaptation, the pro-Soviet SPRING MADNESS, with Ayres again, directed by my recent discovery S. Sylvan Simon. TCM is airing that one soon if American readers are curious.