Indoor Derricks

The miniature indoor oil derrick was a short-lived design fad, but you can see examples in WRITTEN ON THE WIND — the late Dorothy Malone (above) keeps hers as a kind of phallic symbol and a memento of dear dead daddy (above above) — and SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, where father Pat Hingle keeps a model of the derrick he fell from, resulting in his limp — in reality, poor Pat got it falling down an elevator shaft, fracturing his skull, hip, wrist, half his ribs, and his leg in three places. Ouch.

Worse, it cost him the lead in ELMER GANTRY.

I like the idea of his character keeping a model of the near-fatal derrick as a kind of trophy. Hingle plays his character as the kind of man who would do that — a roaring bully-boy, a proto-Nolte, communicating in a brutish semaphore of arm-punching and back-slapping.

His screen son, Warren Beatty, keeps a much smaller derrick in his bedroom.

We just watched SPLENDOR for the first time — I’m still way behind on Kazan. It’s pretty great, even if the story is barely a sentence-worth. It has emotion, star power, sharp observation, beautiful photography and design, brilliant casting down to the smallest role — Godfrey Cambridge plays a chauffeur in one shot… we keep cutting to Sandy Dennis, barely more than an extra…

It also has a real sense of period. Natalie Wood even does period-specific gestures, like that semi-circular wave, palm out, close to the face, that you see in ’20s movies. It’s all a great contrast to INSIDE DAISY CLOVER’S shunning of period costume.

Universal Truths

A rare misprint in the Il Cinema Ritrovato program had a Sirk masterpiece listed as ALL HEAVENS ALLOWED, which seems like a nice, tolerant approach. I don’t have any set photos from that, but two other Sirks also screen in Bologna are represented. MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION is above and below.

Shock Jane Wyman appearance. You don’t usually see the stars, or anyone else, in these things. Maybe Sirk sets were so relaxed the actors just naturally didn’t want to get up and move. Jane looks pretty tranquil. Still, you never see Rock Hudson.

Here’s two from Sirk’s lesser-known THUNDER ON THE HILL. Should I see it? I bet I should. I had convinced myself I actually had seen it, but I think between SUMMER STORM and THE FIRST LEGION, which I can barely remember, I neglected it.

Some sets just look bland and generic, some seem intriguing and characterful but you can’t recall the movie using them. But this staircase from WRITTEN ON THE WIND is pretty iconic if you’ve seen the movie. That’s a staircase just made for staggering down. Seeing it like this has an uncanny quality because, unlike in the movie where it’s as much a part of the Technicolor fantasy as Lauren Bacall or Robert Stack, here it’s more like a workplace for technicians and actors. A place you could walk into, wearing your own clothes.

A Bologna moment: they projected an original Technicolor print of WRITTEN, and at one point the projector gave a hiccup and the image jounced UP, to reveal not the heads of the actors poking up from the bottom of the screen, but simply MORE IMAGE. Because Sirk was forced to compose for both widescreen and boxy TV, and shoot “open-matte” so that the top of and bottom of the squareish TV frame exist, but are masked out during cinema projection (normally). If you’ve ever seen the 1:1.33 TV ratio version, you may have found it rather distant, since Sirk was forced to basically compose wider than he preferred. This was kind of a momentary peek behind the curtain — and so are these stills, in a different way.

Holy shit, it’s Dorothy Malone! Unless it’s her stand-in. Plus a corner of what could be Rock Hudson, or Rock Hudson’s stand-in (AKA Fake Rock). Looks like Sirk’s sets really were relaxed, happy places. A film scholar once told me that he couldn’t answer my questions about how funny Sirk intended his films to be but that the important thing was, he was certain Sirk was a GREAT GUY. This struck me as weird and unsatisfactory (but pleasingly idiosyncratic). If we found out something bad about Sirk, would his films cease to be any good? What I would offer as an alternative would be that maybe Sirk channelled his work through the finest, noblest part of his personality.

No more set photos left! But more gratefully received.

Happy mistakes

A mismanaged day. but it resulted in some good things ~

The morning was easy — to Cinema Jolly for Dave Kehr’s retrospectives on Universal, the Laemmle years, and William K. Howard. LADIES MUST LOVE, an uncharacteristically zippy E.A. Dupont pre-code and the Sturges-scripted THE POWER AND THE GLORY. More on those another time.

In the afternoon I couldn’t make up my mind. I’d seen the silent THE INFORMER in Bo’ness. I opted for WRITTEN ON THE WIND — a Technicolor print from the camera negative, as it turned out. Scratchy in places, but breathtaking.

I had totally planned to see WISE BLOOD, introduced by producer Michael Fitzgerald and Queen of Continuity Angela Allen, but found myself switching to Iranian melodrama ZARBAT instead. It wasn’t as crazy as billed, so I bailed on it, only to learn that I left just as it was about to go nuts.

That brought me out into a thunderstorm so I sought shelter at Rupert Julian’s THE SAVAGE, which had Colleen Moore but was still a Rupert Julian film from 1917, and incomplete to boot. But where else am I going to see that? And then a Gregory La Cava cartoon, and then I skipped out during a documentary figuring to return for Mae West in SHE DONE HIM WRONG, only to find a massive queue for that and a further thunderstorm.

Enjoyed a big chat with David Bordwell and Dave Kehr and Jonathan Rosenbaum though, so that was fine. Had massive dinner. Assumed the open-air screening of King Vidor’s THE PATSY was off, so set my heart on ERASERHEAD. In fact, the rain had stopped, the forecasts were clear and THE PATSY went ahead.

ERASERHEAD was great, though. Spotted a picture of a mushroom cloud on Henry’s wall.