Sidney Sheldon was one of the most prolific screenwriters of the 1950s. I can only vouch for the films of his I've seen, but even if they comprised his entire body of work, it'd be one hell of a career.
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947): Academy Award, Best Writing, Original Screenplay
Easter Parade (1948)
The Barkleys of Broadway (1949)
Annie Get Your Gun (1950)
Dream Wife (1953, which he also directed)
He also created the TV series Hart to Hart and I Dream of Jeannie
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
On DVD This Tuesday Yesterday...
A lot of good stuff is coming out this week. As always, a complete list of releases for 1/30/07 can be found at DVD Aficionado.
Twentieth Century Fox brings us three Doris Day films: Caprice (1967, Frank Tashlin), Do Not Disturb (1965, Ralph Levy) and Move Over Darling (1963, Michael Gordon), a remake the 1940 Cary Grant/Irene Dunne comedy My Favorite Wife. Move Over Darling was originally conceived as a vehicle for Dean Martin and Marilyn Monroe, called Something's Gotta Give and directed by George Cukor, but Monroe died before the film could be completed.
The fabulous Michelle Pfeiffer's Oscar-nominated performance in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989, Steven Kloves).
The Criterion Collection: Monsters and Madmen
The Atomic Submarine (1959, Spencer Gordon Bennett)
Corridors of Blood (1958, Robert Day)
First Man Into Space (1959, Day)
Grip of the Strangler (1958, Day)
The Silence of the Lambs: Collector's Edition (1991, Jonathan Demme). This is a two-disc set with all the trimmings: "Inside the Labyrinth: Making of The Silence of the Lambs" hour-long documentary; "The Silence of the Lambs: Page to Screen" 2 Part Documentary; "Jonathan Demme & Jodie Foster" 3 Part Documentary; "Scoring the Silence" featurette; Original 1991 Making Of Featurette; 22 Deleted Scenes; Outtakes Reel; Anthony Hopkins Phone Message; Photo Gallery; TV Spots; Theatrical Trailer; Teaser Trailer. A Hannibal Lecter collection is also released on the 30th, but it looks like it contains the single-disc release of SotL
Phyllis Diller: Not Just Another Pretty Face appears to be a compilation of some of her TV appearances. According to amazon, one of the special features listed is Phyllis on What's My Line?
Film Noir Double Feature: Please Murder Me (1956, Peter Godfrey) / A Life at Stake (1954, Peter Guilfoyle). Both of these films star Angela Lansbury. The former pairs her with Raymond Burr. I. Love. Hollywood.
Sinners in Paradise (1938, James Whale). I know nothing about this film, but anything directed by Whale is worth seeing.
Viva Pedro - The Pedro Almodóvar Collection
Carne trémula (Live Flesh) (1997)
La Flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret) (1995)
Hable con ella (Talk to Her) (2002)
La Ley del deseo (Law of Desire) (1987)
La Mala educación (Bad Education) - Original Uncut NC-17 Version (2004)
Matador (The Bullfighter) (1986)
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) (1988)
Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother) (1999)
Warner Home Video releases the second (and final) round of the DVD Decision 2006 winners:
Angels in the Outfield (1951, Clarence Brown) (amazon.com Exclusive)
The Arrangement (1969, Elia Kazan)
Band of Angels (1957, Raoul Walsh)
Gymkata (1985, Robert Clouse): "The thrill of gymnastics. The kill of karate." Never has a tagline made me want to see a movie more.
Looker (1981, Michael Crichton)
Madame Curie (1943, Mervyn LeRoy)
Twentieth Century Fox brings us three Doris Day films: Caprice (1967, Frank Tashlin), Do Not Disturb (1965, Ralph Levy) and Move Over Darling (1963, Michael Gordon), a remake the 1940 Cary Grant/Irene Dunne comedy My Favorite Wife. Move Over Darling was originally conceived as a vehicle for Dean Martin and Marilyn Monroe, called Something's Gotta Give and directed by George Cukor, but Monroe died before the film could be completed.
The fabulous Michelle Pfeiffer's Oscar-nominated performance in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989, Steven Kloves).
The Criterion Collection: Monsters and Madmen
The Atomic Submarine (1959, Spencer Gordon Bennett)
Corridors of Blood (1958, Robert Day)
First Man Into Space (1959, Day)
Grip of the Strangler (1958, Day)
The Silence of the Lambs: Collector's Edition (1991, Jonathan Demme). This is a two-disc set with all the trimmings: "Inside the Labyrinth: Making of The Silence of the Lambs" hour-long documentary; "The Silence of the Lambs: Page to Screen" 2 Part Documentary; "Jonathan Demme & Jodie Foster" 3 Part Documentary; "Scoring the Silence" featurette; Original 1991 Making Of Featurette; 22 Deleted Scenes; Outtakes Reel; Anthony Hopkins Phone Message; Photo Gallery; TV Spots; Theatrical Trailer; Teaser Trailer. A Hannibal Lecter collection is also released on the 30th, but it looks like it contains the single-disc release of SotL
Phyllis Diller: Not Just Another Pretty Face appears to be a compilation of some of her TV appearances. According to amazon, one of the special features listed is Phyllis on What's My Line?
Film Noir Double Feature: Please Murder Me (1956, Peter Godfrey) / A Life at Stake (1954, Peter Guilfoyle). Both of these films star Angela Lansbury. The former pairs her with Raymond Burr. I. Love. Hollywood.
Sinners in Paradise (1938, James Whale). I know nothing about this film, but anything directed by Whale is worth seeing.
Viva Pedro - The Pedro Almodóvar Collection
Carne trémula (Live Flesh) (1997)
La Flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret) (1995)
Hable con ella (Talk to Her) (2002)
La Ley del deseo (Law of Desire) (1987)
La Mala educación (Bad Education) - Original Uncut NC-17 Version (2004)
Matador (The Bullfighter) (1986)
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) (1988)
Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother) (1999)
Warner Home Video releases the second (and final) round of the DVD Decision 2006 winners:
Angels in the Outfield (1951, Clarence Brown) (amazon.com Exclusive)
The Arrangement (1969, Elia Kazan)
Band of Angels (1957, Raoul Walsh)
Gymkata (1985, Robert Clouse): "The thrill of gymnastics. The kill of karate." Never has a tagline made me want to see a movie more.
Looker (1981, Michael Crichton)
Madame Curie (1943, Mervyn LeRoy)
Saturday, January 27, 2007
On DVD Last Tuesday...and the Tuesday before that... (January 16th and 23rd)
Tuesday, January 16th...
- The Criterion Collection released Border Radio (1987, Alison Anders, Dean Lent, Kurt Voss) and Robert Bresson's Mouchette (1967).
- From First Run Features came Rotation, [imdb, DEFA] (1949, Wolfgang Staudte) and Der Rat der Gotter [imdb, DEFA] (1950, Kurt Maetzig). Usually, I only link film titles to the internet movies database, in case anyone wants to learn more about the title in question. However, imdb does not have a lot of information on either film's actual content. Fortunately, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is the home of the DEFA Film Library, "...the only archive and study center outside Europe devoted to the study of a broad spectrum of filmmaking by East German filmmakers or related to East Germany from 1946 to the present.... DEFA stands for Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft – the state-run East German film studios, where films were made from 1946 to 1990." Hence, the two separate links. Each movie looks fascinating, and we can be grateful to UMass Amherst for preserving the film legacy of East Germany.
- Click here for a complete list of 1/16/07 releases.
Tuesday, January 23rd...
- The Signature Collection: Robert Mitchum (Warner Home Video)
Angel Face (1952, Otto Preminger)
The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969, Burt Kennedy)
Home from the Hill (1960, Vincente Minnelli)
Macao (1952, Josef von Sternberg)
The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960)
The Yakuza (1975, Sydney Pollack) - Sony brings us two twofers: Don't Knock the Rock/Rock Around the Clock, both directed by Fred F. Sears in 1956; and Twist Around the Clock/Don't Knock the Twist (1961/1962), both directed by Oscar Rudolph.
- A 2-disc special edition of Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof (1971, MGM).
- The Films of Kenneth Anger: Volume 1 (Fantoma)
Eaux d'artifice (1953)
Fireworks (1947)
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)
Puce Moment (1949)
Rabbit's Moon (1950) - Current Oscar nominee for Best Documentary, Jesus Camp (2006, Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady, Magnolia)
- Criterion is reissuing remastered editions of Kurosawa's twin classics Yojimbo (1961) and Tsubaki Sanjuro (1962), available both individually and together.
- Click here for a complete list of 1/23/07 releases.
Academy Award Nominations: Best Supporting Actress
I'm not going to bother with a complete list of Oscar nominations because by this time, you've probably already seen them. (In case you haven't, here you go). Instead, I figured I'd just take one category at a time, starting with Best Supporting Actress, since that's the only one for which I've seen every nominee.
Here are the nominees, followed by the number of awards each has won already this year, from various critics' societies (a breakdown of who won what from whom can be found here).
Adriana Barraza for Babel: 1
Cate Blanchett for Notes on a Scandal: 6
Abigail Breslin for Little Miss Sunshine: 5 (2 for Supporting Actress, 3 for Performance by a Youth)
Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls: 18 (11 for Supporting Actress, 7 for Breakthrough Performance)
Rinko Kikuchi for Babel: 4 (3 for Supporting Actress, 1 for Breakthrough Performance)
Hudson is clearly the favorite to win, though her fellow nominees all delivered strong work. Effie is really a leading role in Dreamgirls, and Hudson gets as much screen time as Beyonce Knowles. But Knowles is a Big Star, so she got the above-the-title billing and the right to a (non-existent) Leading Actress nomination. And to be fair, she did make The Pink Panther and Goldmember.
Of all the nominees, Kikuchi impressed me most. Her character was the most heartbreaking in Babel and her story the most compelling, both because of her extraordinary performance. Barraza was just as good, but I didn't believe for one second that her son would dump her in the desert with two children in the middle of the night.
Cate Blanchett is one of my favorite actresses of our generation. In 2006, she turned in equally strong work in Babel, the little-seen (and even littler-appreciated) The Good German and Notes on a Scandal, for which she is nominated. Her versatility is reminiscent of Meryl Streep's. But, like Streep, Blanchett is so consistently good that she may never get another Oscar. We expect her to be great, and aren't surprised when she is. She'd have to have another perfect vehicle like Elizabeth to really wow the Academy.
Breslin is the heart and soul of Little Miss Sunshine and her performance showed remarkable range. Consider her reaction to the news that she qualified for the pageant, the silent way she comforts her brother along the side of the highway, and her joyfully oblivious striptease. This is a cute little girl who can also act - which is always a nice surprise. (As a totally random side note, I saw LMS at a preview screening that was followed by a Q&A with the film's directors. One guy raised his hand and compared Breslin with a "young Dakota Fanning." Please.)
Front-runner: Jennifer Hudson
Upset-that-wouldn't-surprise-me: Abigail Breslin
I would vote for: Rinko Kikuchi
The Overlooked:
Catherine O'Hara, For Your Consideration
Sharon Stone, Bobby
Anyone I've left out?
Here are the nominees, followed by the number of awards each has won already this year, from various critics' societies (a breakdown of who won what from whom can be found here).
Adriana Barraza for Babel: 1
Cate Blanchett for Notes on a Scandal: 6
Abigail Breslin for Little Miss Sunshine: 5 (2 for Supporting Actress, 3 for Performance by a Youth)
Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls: 18 (11 for Supporting Actress, 7 for Breakthrough Performance)
Rinko Kikuchi for Babel: 4 (3 for Supporting Actress, 1 for Breakthrough Performance)
Hudson is clearly the favorite to win, though her fellow nominees all delivered strong work. Effie is really a leading role in Dreamgirls, and Hudson gets as much screen time as Beyonce Knowles. But Knowles is a Big Star, so she got the above-the-title billing and the right to a (non-existent) Leading Actress nomination. And to be fair, she did make The Pink Panther and Goldmember.
Of all the nominees, Kikuchi impressed me most. Her character was the most heartbreaking in Babel and her story the most compelling, both because of her extraordinary performance. Barraza was just as good, but I didn't believe for one second that her son would dump her in the desert with two children in the middle of the night.
Cate Blanchett is one of my favorite actresses of our generation. In 2006, she turned in equally strong work in Babel, the little-seen (and even littler-appreciated) The Good German and Notes on a Scandal, for which she is nominated. Her versatility is reminiscent of Meryl Streep's. But, like Streep, Blanchett is so consistently good that she may never get another Oscar. We expect her to be great, and aren't surprised when she is. She'd have to have another perfect vehicle like Elizabeth to really wow the Academy.
Breslin is the heart and soul of Little Miss Sunshine and her performance showed remarkable range. Consider her reaction to the news that she qualified for the pageant, the silent way she comforts her brother along the side of the highway, and her joyfully oblivious striptease. This is a cute little girl who can also act - which is always a nice surprise. (As a totally random side note, I saw LMS at a preview screening that was followed by a Q&A with the film's directors. One guy raised his hand and compared Breslin with a "young Dakota Fanning." Please.)
Front-runner: Jennifer Hudson
Upset-that-wouldn't-surprise-me: Abigail Breslin
I would vote for: Rinko Kikuchi
The Overlooked:
Catherine O'Hara, For Your Consideration
Sharon Stone, Bobby
Anyone I've left out?
Monday, January 22, 2007
2006 Awards Season Round-Up: Golden Globes, Producers Guild and 8 other Film Critics Circle Awards
2006 Award Season Round-Up
Your one stop shop for winning the office Oscar pool
Below is a list of award-winners from those award-giving institutions that I feel merit mention. I'll update throughout the award-season.
(Not every film society gives every award, so some categories may seem a little thin.)
Critics' Societies Included:
- African-American Film Critics Association (A-A)
- Austin Film Critics Association (Au)
- Boston Society of Film Critics (Bo)
- Broadcast Film Critic Association (BFCA)
- Central Ohio Film Critics Association (OH)
- Chicago Film Critics Association (Chi)
- Dallas-Ft. Worth Film Critics Association (DFW)
- Florida Film Critics Circle (FL)
- Hollywood Foreign Press Association Golden Globe Awards (GG)
- The International Press Academy Satellite Awards (IPA)
- Iowa Film Critics (IA)
- Kansas City Film Critics Circle (KC)
- Las Vegas Film Critics Society (LV)
- Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LA)
- National Board of Review (NBR)
- National Society of Film Critics (NSFC)
- New York Film Critics Circle (NY)
- New York Film Critics Online (ny.com)
- Oklahoma Film Critics Circle (OK)
- Online Film Critics Society (OFCS)
- Phoenix Film Critics Society (Ph)
- Producers Guild of America (PGA)
- St. Louis Gateway Film Critics Association (St.L)
- San Diego Film Critics Society (SD)
- San Francisco Film Critics Circle (SF)
- Southeastern Film Critics Association (SE)
- Toronto Film Critics Association (Tor)
- Utah Film Critics Society (UT)
- Vancouver Film Critics Circle
- Washington, DC Area Film Critics (DC)
Best Film
United 93: 9 (Au, DC, DFW, KC, NY, OFCS, OK, Ph, UT)
The Departed: 8 (Bo, BFCA, Chi, FL, IPA: dr, LV, SE, St.L: dr) *
Dreamgirls: 3 (A-A, GG: com/mus, IPA: comedy)**
Letters From Iwo Jima: 3 (LA, NBR, SD)
Children of Men: 2 (OH, Van)
Little Children: 2 (IA, SF)
Little Miss Sunshine: 2 (PGA, St. L: com/mus)
The Queen: 2 (ny.com, Tor)
Babel: 1 (GG: drama)
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: 1 (BFCA: mus/com)
El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth): 1 (NSFC)
*dr = drama
**com/mus = comedy/musical
Best Director
Martin Scorsese, The Departed: 17 (Bo, BFCA, Chi, DC, DFW, FL, GG, IA, LV, NBR, NY, OFCS, OH, OK, Ph, SE, St. L)
Paul Greengrass, United 93: 4 (KC, LA, NSFC, SF)
Alfonso Cuaron, Children of Men: 3 (Au, UT, Van)
Bill Condon, Dreamgirls: 2 (A-A, IPA (tie))
Stephen Frears, The Queen: 2 (ny.com, Tor (tie))
Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne, L'Enfant: 1 (Tor (tie))
Clint Eastwood, Flags of Our Fathers: 1 (IPA (tie))
Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima: 1 (SD)
Best First Film
Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine: 3 (OK, ny.com, OSFC)
Ryan Fleck, Half Nelson: 2 (Bo, NY)
Rian Johnson, Brick: 2 (Au, Chi (Most Promising Director))
Jason Reitman, Thank You For Smoking: 2 (NBR, Tor)
Emilio Estevez, Bobby: 1 (Ph (Breakout Performance of the Year, Behind the Camera))
Best Original Screenplay
Peter Morgan, The Queen: 9 (Chi, GG, LA, IPA, NSFC, NY, ny.com, St. L, Tor)
Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine, 6 (BFCA, DC, DFW, KC, Ph, SE)
Rian Johnson, Brick: 3 (OH, SF, UT)
Guillermo del Toro, El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth): 2 (Au, OFCS)
Zach Helm, Stranger Than Fiction: 1 (NBR)
Karen Moncrieff, The Dead Girl: 1 (SD)
Best Adapted Screenplay
William Monahan, The Departed: 8 (Bo. Chi, FL, IPA, KC, OH, Ph, SE)
Jason Reitman, Thank You for Smoking: 3 (DC, LV, SD)
Alfonso Cuaron, Children of Men: 2 (Au, OFCS)
Todd Field & Tom Perrotta, Little Children: 1 (SF)
Ron Nyswaner: The Painted Veil: 1 (NBR)
Best Animated Feature
Cars: 11 (Au, BFCA, GG, IA, NBR, OH, OK, PGA, SD, SE, St. L)
Happy Feet: 6 (DC, DFW, LA, NY, ny.com, Tor)
Monster House: 2 (FL, LV)
Flushed Away: 1 (Ph)
El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth): 1 (IPA (Animated or Mixed Media))
Over the Hedge: 1 (KC)
A Scanner Darkly: 1(OFCS)
Best Documentary
An Inconvenient Truth: 19 (Chi, DC, DFW, FL, KC, LA, LV, NBR, NSFC, ny.com, OFCS, OH, OK, Ph, SE, SF, St. L, UT)
Deliver Us from Evil: 3 (Bo (tie), IPA, NY )
Shut Up & Sing: 2 (Bo (tie), SD)
This Film Is Not Yet Rated: 1 (Au)
Manufactured Landscapes: 1 (Tor)
Best Foreign (Language) Film
El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth): 12 (Au, Bo, DC, FL, IA, ny.com, OFCS, OH, OK, SE, SF, St. L)
Letters From Iwo Jima: 7 (BFCA, Chi, DFW, GG, KC, Ph, UT)
Volver: 3 (IPA, NBR, Van)
L'armee des obres (Army of Shadows): 1 (NY)*
L'Enfant: 1 (Tor)
Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others): 1 (LA)
Qian li zou qi (Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles): 1 (SD)
*Though it was made in 1969, L'armee des obres did not receive its US premiere until 2006.
Best Actor
Forest Whitaker, The Last King Of Scotland: 23 (A-A, Bo, BFCA, Chi, DC, DFW, FL, GG: dr, IA, IPA: dr, KC, LA (tie), LV, NBR, NSFC, NY, ny.com, OFCS, OK, Ph, SE, St. L, Van)
Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: 5 (GG: com/mus, LA (tie), SF, Tor, UT)
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Departed: 2 (Au, OH)
Joseph Cross: Running with Scissors: 1 (IPA: com/mus)
Ken Takakura, Qian li zou qi (Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles): 1 (SD)
Best Actress
Helen Mirren, The Queen: 28 (A-A, Bo, BFCA, Chi, DC, DFW, FL, GG: dr, IA, IPA: dr, KC, LA, LV, NBR, NSFC, NY, ny.com, OFCS, OH, OK, Ph, SD, SE, SF, St. L, Tor, UT, Van)
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada: 2 (GG: com/mus, IPA: com/mus)
Ellen Page, Hard Candy: 1 (Au)
Best Supporting Actor
Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children: 8 (Chi, DFW, IA, NY, OFCS, OK, SE, SF)
Michael Sheen, The Queen: 5 (KC, LA, ny.com, Tor, UT)
Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond: 4 (DC, LV, NBR, St. L)
Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls: 4 (A-A, BFCA, GG, OH)
Jack Nicholson, The Departed: 3 (Au, FL, Ph)
Mark Wahlberg, The Departed: 2 (Bo, NSFC)
Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine: 1 (Van)
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Departed: 1 (IPA)
Ray Winstone, The Proposition: 1 (SD)
Best Supporting Actress
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls: 11 (A-A, BFCA, DC, GG, IPA, LV, NY, ny.com (tie), OH, SE, St. L)
Cate Blanchett, Notes on a Scandal: 6 (DFW, FL, OK, Ph, Tor, Van)
Rinko Kikuchi, Babel: 3 (Au, Chi, UT)
Catherine O'Hara, For Your Consideration: 3 (KC, NBR, ny.com (tie))
Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine: 2 (IA, OSFC)
Adriana Barraza, Babel: 1 (SF)
Shareeka Epps, Half Nelson: 1 (Bo)
Luminita Gheorghiu, Moartea domnului Lazarescu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu): 1 (LA)
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada: 1 (NSFC)
Meryl Streep, A Prairie Home Companion: 1 (NSFC)
Lili Taylor, Factotum: 1 (SD)
Breakthrough Performance: Male
Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat... and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby: 2 (Chi, OSFC)
Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson: 1 (NBR)
Breakthrough Performance: Female
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls: 7 (Au, FL, NBR (tie), ny.com, OH, OK, Ph)
Rinko Kikuchi, Babel: 1 (NBR (tie))
Best Performance by a Youth, Male
Paul Dano, Little Miss Sunshine: 1 (BFCA)
Jaden Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness: 1 (Ph)
Best Performance by a Youth, Female
Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine: 3 (BFCA, LV, Ph)
Best Acting By An Ensemble
Little Miss Sunshine: 4 (BFCA, DC, ny.com, Ph)
The Departed: 3 (IPA, NBR, OH)
Babel: 1 (SD)
United 93: 1 (Bo)
Best Art Direction and Production Design
K.K. Barrett (PD) & Anne Seibel (AD), Marie Antionette: 3 (DC, LV, Ph)
Henry Bumstead (PD), Jack G. Taylor Jr. & Richard Goddard (AD), Flags of Our Fathers: 1 (IPA)
Eugenio Caballero (PD/AD), El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth): 1 (LA )
Owen Paterson, V for Vendetta: 1 (SD)
Costume Design
Milena Canonero, Marie Antionette: 1 (Ph)
Patricia Field, The Devil Wears Prada: 1 (IPA)
Best Cinematography
Emmanuel Lubezki, Children of Men: 6 (Au, Chi, LA, LV, NSFC, OSFC)
Guillermo Navarro, El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth): 3 (Bo, FL, NY)
Dean Semler, Apocalypto: 3 (DFW, OH, Ph)
Dick Pope, The Illusionist: 2 (ny.com, SD)
Tom Stern, Flags of Our Fathers: 1 (IPA)
Best Editing
Christopher Rouse, Richard Pearson and Clare Douglas, United 93: 2 (OSFC, SD)
Thelma Schoonmaker, The Departed: 2 (LV, Ph) Mark Helfrich, Mark Goldblatt, Julia Wong: X-Men: The Last Stand: 1 (IPA)
Best Music Score
Gustavo Santolalla, Babel: 3 (IPA, OH, SD)
Alexandre Desplat, The Painted Veil: 2 (GG, LA)
Philip Glass, The Illusionist: 2 (BFCA, ny.com)
Clint Mansell, The Fountain: 2 (Chi, OSFC)
Alexandre Desplat, The Queen: 1 (LA)
Thomas Newman, The Good German: 1 (LV)
Best Original Song
"Listen,"Henry Krieger, Scott Cutler, Beyoncé Knowles, and Anne Preven, Dreamgirls: 1 (BFCA)
"Ordinary Miracle," David Stewart & Glen Ballard, Charlotte's Web: 1 (LV)
"The Song of My Heart," Prince Rogers Nelson, Happy Feet: 1 (GG)
"You Know My Name," Chris Cornell, David Arnold, Casino Royale: 1 (IPA)
Sound (Editing & Mixing)
Willie Burton, Michael Minkler, Bob Beemer, Richard E. Yawn, Dreamgirls: 1 (IPA)
Best Visual Effects
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: 2 (IPA, St. L)
Superman Returns: 1 (Ph)
X-Men: The Last Stand: 1 (LV)
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Coming Your Way in April: The James Cagney Signature Collection
Warner Hone Video announced last week the latest release in their Signature Collection series: James Cagney, due in stores April 24th. Most of Cagney's best films have either been released. Yankee Doodle Dandy is available in a 2 disc special edition, which includes a very good doc on Cagney's life. Angels with Dirty Faces, The Public Enemy, The Roaring Twenties and White Heat, are included in The Warner Bros. Pictures Gangster Collection. "G" Men, Each Dawn I Die and the excellent if lesser-known City for Conquest can be found in The Warner Bros. Pictures Tough Guys Collection. All of these films are also available individually.The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941, Michael Curtiz), a romantic comedy co-starring...Bette Davis? Yup. An even bigger surprise is that it's pretty darn funny. Davis is an heiress, Cagney is an out-of-work pilot. They don't like each other at first, but then... oh, I wouldn't want to spoil it for you. The supporting cast includes several first-rate character actors from Warner's fine stable of contract players: Jack Carson, Eugene Pallette (essentially reprising his role from My Man Godfrey), George Tobias and Harry Davenport. Cagney and Davis were previously directed by Curtiz in 1934's Jimmy the Gent.
I haven't seen the other four in the set, so I can't vouch for quality. But the Signature Collections tend to be pretty reliable for blind buying, especially since the films average out to about $8 each.
Captains of the Clouds (1941, Curtiz) co-stars Dennis Morgan and Brenda Marshall.
The Fighting 69th (1940, William Keighley) has Pat O'Brien playing a priest, just like in Angels with Dirty Faces.
Torrid Zone (1940, Keighley) reunites Cagney with Ann Sheridan (City for Conquest) and O'Brien.
The West Point Story (1950, Roy Del Ruth) has White Heat's Virginia Mayo and Love Me or Leave Me's Doris Day, presumable vying for Cagney's affections.
Happy shopping!
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Germanine Greer on Lauren Bacall v. Catherine Deneuve
Siren song
Lauren Bacall was tough, funny and sexy; Catherine Deneuve was meek, passive and expressionless. Germaine Greer laments the decline from feisty broad to simpering Barbie
Germaine Greer, Guardian, 30 Dec 2006
The movie phenomenon known as Lauren Bacall took time to put together. The woman who began life as Betty Joan Perske studied dancing for 13 years, then acting, and became a stage actress and model called Betty Bacall. Her picture on the cover of Harper's Bazaar caught the eye of the wife of movie producer Howard Hawks, who cast her in To Have and Have Not (1944) and created the movie star Lauren Bacall. She was not a regular beauty; her face was too broad, her mouth too wide, her eyes too far apart, and her ears too big. She was also neither blonde nor dark, but sallow and mousy.
Catherine Deneuve is the opposite. Everything about her is perfect: eyes beautifully set in perfect oval face, mouth neat, skin transparently fair, a body that could serve as the template for the first blow-up doll. Only her name and her hair colour were fake. She was born Catherine Dorléac, daughter of stage and screen actor Maurice Dorléac and his actress wife, whose maiden name she eventually took. Deneuve got her first screen role when she was only 13, and she has been in movies non-stop for 50 years. She never thought of doing anything else, and at 63 she still doesn't. She says she never works more than half of any year, but what she does with the other half is unknown.
Bacall was 19 when she played her first scene opposite Humphrey Bogart; within a few weeks she was in his bed and his marriage to Mayo Methot was over. Already she was doing stuff that would reverberate through the decades. You can still see her as Slim Browning standing in the doorway, saying: "You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you Steve? You just put your lips together and ... blow."
Slim Browning - hotel thief, real name Marie - has won her new name from Harry Morgan (Bogart) because, when faced with extreme danger, she lost no smidgen of her cool. The name she was given was that of Hawks's second wife, the person who identified her as a Hawksian woman in the first place. Slim's coolness and courage also give her the right to initiate a sexual encounter, and to challenge her male partner, who has to challenge her right back. Their mutual wariness and occasional gruffness with each other builds the sexual tension between them to the point that when they finally get it on, we all feel like cheering.
Try as I might, I can't remember anything said by any character that Deneuve ever played, but the difference is as much one of era as of talent or personality. When Bacall came into the limelight the war was still on, and women were still self-sufficient, bouncing around in short skirts and chunky heels, talking loud and drawing a crowd. Before the Hays Code sanitised the movies in 1934, a series of remarkable actresses, including Bebe Daniels, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, Norma Shearer and Jean Harlow, had created female characters who managed to be tough, funny and sexy all at once.
In a way, I can see how Ruby Keeler would ber included in this group. She usually played the sassy virgin to counter-balance the more "experienced" dames embodied by Ginger Rogers or Joan Blondell. I love Ruby Keeler's films. I love Ruby Keeler as a movie star. But a remarkable actress she wasn't.
The type of spunky working girl was established by ex-chorus-girl Joan Crawford in the 1930s - most unforgettably as Flämmchen in Grand Hotel, which won best picture at the 1932 Academy Awards. Crawford was soon joined by Rosalind Russell, who was in her element playing feisty women such as the divorced reporter who ends up working for her ex-husband in His Girl Friday (1940), also directed by Hawks.
Hawks directed another unforgettably stylish, wisecracking, sexually aggressive female in Bringing up Baby (1938), namely Katharine Hepburn. In Only Angels Have Wings, made by Hawks the next year, Jean Arthur's character tells her male counterpart: "I'm hard to get, Geoff. All you have to do is ask me." These were women with their own agenda, who took risks knowingly, and took the consequences.
It was 1944 when Bacall joined the select group of Hawksian women. By the time Hawks had finished directing her in The Big Sleep two years later, time was running out for women who could give as good as they got. With all his clout in Hollywood, Hawks couldn't keep them alive. The war was over and women were back in the bedroom and the kitchen, working on the baby boom. Hawks's next starring ladies would be Marilyn Monroe (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953) and Joan Collins (Land of the Pharaohs, 1955) in the cinch-waisted, pointy-breasted, simpering 1950s.
By the time Bacall was teamed with Bogart again in 1948 in Key Largo, directed by John Huston [actually, they made Dark Passage for Delmer Daves one year earlier], hemlines had dropped and lipstick was pink, and nobody knew what to do with her. All she had to do in Key Largo was mime the family feeling and warm-hearted wifely innocence that went with high-heeled rope-soled espadrilles and a scraped-back hairstyle that showed her big ears. The thing Bacall always knew was how to pace a scene, how to time her lines, how to balance a word with a look. She didn't emote in any obvious way. It was all in the stillness, the upward glance, the few words. She had some successes in the 1950s, notably in Young Man with a Horn (1950), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Designing Woman (1957), but they only went to prove that nobody was writing films for grown-up women. [I've always found Designing Woman to be an especially irritating film. I wouldn't have thought that the combined efforts of Bacall, Gregory Peck, Dolores Grey and Vincente Minnelli would result in anything this...shrill.]
Which is where Catherine Deneuve comes in. Her big breakthrough was Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), a masterpiece of romantic French whimsy devised, written and directed by Jacques Demy, in which 20-year-old Deneuve played Geneviève, the 16-year-old daughter of the proprietress of a shop called Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. She and her mechanic boyfriend are in love and want to get married but he is called up for military service in Algeria. They go to bed together, he leaves, she bids him farewell at Cherbourg railway station - et voilà, she is pregnant. In fact, Deneuve had just given birth to her son by Roger Vadim when she started work on the movie.
Geneviève was a role for a French Olivia Newton John, and Deneuve was probably the nearest thing they had, but without a voice. What she did have was hair, as much hair comparative to the rest of her as any Barbie doll, and bleached beyond an inch of its life. The mass of hair did all the acting and most of the dancing for her. Under the hair was the perfect face, virtually expressionless, endlessly caressed by the camera. Though the plot requires Geneviève to jump the gun and have premarital sex with her boyfriend, Deneuve conveys not one scintilla of sexual desire. She might as well be going to the dentist as going to lose her virginity. Bacall could signify sexual interest with a glance; Deneuve cannot project it at all. This is not so much a matter of personality as of changed priorities.
Deneuve's film career began in 1963, when Roger Vadim cast her as Virtue in his film Le Vice et la Vertu. He had already moulded one young actress into the phenomenon called Brigitte Bardot, and it was only to be expected that he would create the Deneuve brand as well. Once he had identified Deneuve as Virtue, given her a baby and dumped her, she would continue in the same mould through film after film - meek, passive, expressionless. With a brow never furrowed and not a single laugh-line, she would take over from Bardot in 1985 as the face of Marianne, the symbol of the French republic, and her face would still be on the money 15 years later.
Deneuve's is what they call "time-less beauty"; she preserves it by keeping her revs very low. She comes to every role immaculately prepared, and she follows every directorial instruction to the letter. She begins by underplaying and allows the director, in her own phrase, to push her up, if he can be bothered. She has been described as "a receptacle for every conceivable imagination", and this is her strength in cinematic terms. Her cinematic presence is like the dress "the colour of time" that she wore in another of Jacques Demy's fantasies, Peau d'Âne, on which different images and colours were projected. Her effortless blankness allows her to take the imprint of her viewers' fantasies, and so she has achieved a reputation as one of the sexiest film actresses ever to grace the screen.
Belle de Jour (1967) has a reputation for being one of the sexiest films ever made, simply because Deneuve behaves throughout like a pre-adolescent girl. Through the prism of the 21st century, the film seems oddly contrived; what is now a cliche - the child who, subjected to the sexual advances of an adult, then becomes a frigid woman who is only turned on by squalor - is coyly exploited as a series of fetishistic images that juxtapose her fantasy life with her actual life. As Séverine Serizy, Deneuve moves through the imagery of what are meant to be her own fantasies like a sleepwalker. By her own account, director Lous Buñuel could not relate to her at all and never told her what he wanted. Unconsciously, she gave him what he wanted, which was as little as possible. The fantasies were his, after all.
The decision to have her dressed by Yves Saint-Laurent adds a bizarre dimension to the nonexistent plot; we seem to be living within the pages of a glossy magazine, with product placement everywhere. Everywhere Séverine goes, she is conspicuous by her catwalk presence, from her shiny patent leather pumps to the helmet that holds in her mane of Barbie-doll hair. The sex scenes in the brothel consist of her stripping to the full armour of suspender-belt, knickers, stockings and padded brassiere, and allowing ugly men to kiss her. In one extraordinarily unsexy sequence, she is required to process through the rooms of a ducal chateau dressed in nothing but a cloak of black georgette and a crown of white roses. She trots ahead of the camera like a lamb to the slaughter. She should have used a body double; it is typical of her passive obedience that she didn't. Lauren Bacall would never have done that for anyone, would never have stripped and had them shoot her bare arse from the back as she trotted through take after take. The Hawksian woman would have decked any man who asked her.
Buñuel used Deneuve again in Tristana (1970), a far better film than Belle de Jour but much less successful. Again, his real subject was not Tristana but himself. What activates the film is Buñuel's deep hostility to the hypocrisy of Spanish provincial society. Deneuve acts as the surrogate for his child self, the innocent orphan who is seduced by her guardian, who tries to express her own sexuality with a younger man who uses her; mutilated and helpless, she is forced to regularise a union with the man who took her virginity. What remains in the memory is not the shocking last scene or Deneuve's performance, but Buñuel's evocation of 1930s Toledo, seen as through the lens of childhood, wonderfully shot by José F Aguayo. Again, Deneuve's impassivity is exactly what Buñuel needs. It is the still point in his turning world.
Lauren Bacall's film career foundered in the 1950s, and never recovered. She has since played cameo parts and had considerable success on the stage [including Tony Awards for the musicals Applause and Woman of the Year]. Meanwhile, Catherine Deneuve has been, as well as the face of the republic, the face of Chanel No 5, and most recently the face of cosmetics companies MAC and L'Oréal.
The Hawksian woman was an idea that flourished at a time of crisis, in the depression and during the war, when the full energies of women were needed if they were to survive. After the war she was supplanted by the female eunuch, weighed down with huge hair and false eyelashes, unequal to any challenge - all things to all men and nothing to herself.
For further reading...
Lauren Bacall has written two memoirs: By Myself was first published in 1978 and an updated edition was released in 2005, under the title By Myself...and Then Some. By Myself is an exemplar of the memoir genre. Bacall is candid and honest - sometimes brutally - about her life, her marriage to Bogart in 1945 until his death from cancer in 1957; her later marriage to and divorce from Jason Robards; her experience as a Jewish model in the garment district in the early 1940s; the sudden rise and slow ebb of her film career; and her very unexpected success in two Broadway musicals.
Bacall's second book, Now, was published in 1994 and in its introduction, she is quick to point out that it is not a sequel to By Myself. Rather, Now is Bacall looking at her life as it was in 1994, rather than a review of everything that had happened since 1978. Each book is a delightful read; Bacall is one of the few memoirists who doesn't use a ghost writer and doesn't need one. She simply tells her (remarkable) story.
Maria DiBattista writes about many Hawksian women in Fast Talking Dames (2001), a look at women's roles in films of the 1930s. Chronologically, she doesn't get to Bacall's 1944 debut, but many Hawks-directed performances are examined, including Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings, Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.
Howard Hawks's second wife, Nancy - aka Slim - the one who discovered Lauren Bacall on the cover of Harper's Bazaar, and on whom Bacall's character in To Have and Have Not was based, penned a memoir, Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life, as Slim Keith. I haven't read it yet - though I did pick up a copy last weekend - but, according to Ms. Bacall, "This is the story of an American original - a woman of rare wit, intelligence, and beauty. Some of the most important men of our time were drawn to Slim Keith; to know why, one need only read this thoroughly entertaining book." And why would Lauren Bacall lie to me on a dust jacket?
Lauren Bacall was tough, funny and sexy; Catherine Deneuve was meek, passive and expressionless. Germaine Greer laments the decline from feisty broad to simpering Barbie
Germaine Greer, Guardian, 30 Dec 2006
The movie phenomenon known as Lauren Bacall took time to put together. The woman who began life as Betty Joan Perske studied dancing for 13 years, then acting, and became a stage actress and model called Betty Bacall. Her picture on the cover of Harper's Bazaar caught the eye of the wife of movie producer Howard Hawks, who cast her in To Have and Have Not (1944) and created the movie star Lauren Bacall. She was not a regular beauty; her face was too broad, her mouth too wide, her eyes too far apart, and her ears too big. She was also neither blonde nor dark, but sallow and mousy.
Catherine Deneuve is the opposite. Everything about her is perfect: eyes beautifully set in perfect oval face, mouth neat, skin transparently fair, a body that could serve as the template for the first blow-up doll. Only her name and her hair colour were fake. She was born Catherine Dorléac, daughter of stage and screen actor Maurice Dorléac and his actress wife, whose maiden name she eventually took. Deneuve got her first screen role when she was only 13, and she has been in movies non-stop for 50 years. She never thought of doing anything else, and at 63 she still doesn't. She says she never works more than half of any year, but what she does with the other half is unknown.
Bacall was 19 when she played her first scene opposite Humphrey Bogart; within a few weeks she was in his bed and his marriage to Mayo Methot was over. Already she was doing stuff that would reverberate through the decades. You can still see her as Slim Browning standing in the doorway, saying: "You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you Steve? You just put your lips together and ... blow."Slim Browning - hotel thief, real name Marie - has won her new name from Harry Morgan (Bogart) because, when faced with extreme danger, she lost no smidgen of her cool. The name she was given was that of Hawks's second wife, the person who identified her as a Hawksian woman in the first place. Slim's coolness and courage also give her the right to initiate a sexual encounter, and to challenge her male partner, who has to challenge her right back. Their mutual wariness and occasional gruffness with each other builds the sexual tension between them to the point that when they finally get it on, we all feel like cheering.
Try as I might, I can't remember anything said by any character that Deneuve ever played, but the difference is as much one of era as of talent or personality. When Bacall came into the limelight the war was still on, and women were still self-sufficient, bouncing around in short skirts and chunky heels, talking loud and drawing a crowd. Before the Hays Code sanitised the movies in 1934, a series of remarkable actresses, including Bebe Daniels, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, Norma Shearer and Jean Harlow, had created female characters who managed to be tough, funny and sexy all at once.
In a way, I can see how Ruby Keeler would ber included in this group. She usually played the sassy virgin to counter-balance the more "experienced" dames embodied by Ginger Rogers or Joan Blondell. I love Ruby Keeler's films. I love Ruby Keeler as a movie star. But a remarkable actress she wasn't.
The type of spunky working girl was established by ex-chorus-girl Joan Crawford in the 1930s - most unforgettably as Flämmchen in Grand Hotel, which won best picture at the 1932 Academy Awards. Crawford was soon joined by Rosalind Russell, who was in her element playing feisty women such as the divorced reporter who ends up working for her ex-husband in His Girl Friday (1940), also directed by Hawks.
Hawks directed another unforgettably stylish, wisecracking, sexually aggressive female in Bringing up Baby (1938), namely Katharine Hepburn. In Only Angels Have Wings, made by Hawks the next year, Jean Arthur's character tells her male counterpart: "I'm hard to get, Geoff. All you have to do is ask me." These were women with their own agenda, who took risks knowingly, and took the consequences.
It was 1944 when Bacall joined the select group of Hawksian women. By the time Hawks had finished directing her in The Big Sleep two years later, time was running out for women who could give as good as they got. With all his clout in Hollywood, Hawks couldn't keep them alive. The war was over and women were back in the bedroom and the kitchen, working on the baby boom. Hawks's next starring ladies would be Marilyn Monroe (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953) and Joan Collins (Land of the Pharaohs, 1955) in the cinch-waisted, pointy-breasted, simpering 1950s.
By the time Bacall was teamed with Bogart again in 1948 in Key Largo, directed by John Huston [actually, they made Dark Passage for Delmer Daves one year earlier], hemlines had dropped and lipstick was pink, and nobody knew what to do with her. All she had to do in Key Largo was mime the family feeling and warm-hearted wifely innocence that went with high-heeled rope-soled espadrilles and a scraped-back hairstyle that showed her big ears. The thing Bacall always knew was how to pace a scene, how to time her lines, how to balance a word with a look. She didn't emote in any obvious way. It was all in the stillness, the upward glance, the few words. She had some successes in the 1950s, notably in Young Man with a Horn (1950), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Designing Woman (1957), but they only went to prove that nobody was writing films for grown-up women. [I've always found Designing Woman to be an especially irritating film. I wouldn't have thought that the combined efforts of Bacall, Gregory Peck, Dolores Grey and Vincente Minnelli would result in anything this...shrill.]
Which is where Catherine Deneuve comes in. Her big breakthrough was Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), a masterpiece of romantic French whimsy devised, written and directed by Jacques Demy, in which 20-year-old Deneuve played Geneviève, the 16-year-old daughter of the proprietress of a shop called Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. She and her mechanic boyfriend are in love and want to get married but he is called up for military service in Algeria. They go to bed together, he leaves, she bids him farewell at Cherbourg railway station - et voilà, she is pregnant. In fact, Deneuve had just given birth to her son by Roger Vadim when she started work on the movie.
Geneviève was a role for a French Olivia Newton John, and Deneuve was probably the nearest thing they had, but without a voice. What she did have was hair, as much hair comparative to the rest of her as any Barbie doll, and bleached beyond an inch of its life. The mass of hair did all the acting and most of the dancing for her. Under the hair was the perfect face, virtually expressionless, endlessly caressed by the camera. Though the plot requires Geneviève to jump the gun and have premarital sex with her boyfriend, Deneuve conveys not one scintilla of sexual desire. She might as well be going to the dentist as going to lose her virginity. Bacall could signify sexual interest with a glance; Deneuve cannot project it at all. This is not so much a matter of personality as of changed priorities.
Deneuve's film career began in 1963, when Roger Vadim cast her as Virtue in his film Le Vice et la Vertu. He had already moulded one young actress into the phenomenon called Brigitte Bardot, and it was only to be expected that he would create the Deneuve brand as well. Once he had identified Deneuve as Virtue, given her a baby and dumped her, she would continue in the same mould through film after film - meek, passive, expressionless. With a brow never furrowed and not a single laugh-line, she would take over from Bardot in 1985 as the face of Marianne, the symbol of the French republic, and her face would still be on the money 15 years later.
Deneuve's is what they call "time-less beauty"; she preserves it by keeping her revs very low. She comes to every role immaculately prepared, and she follows every directorial instruction to the letter. She begins by underplaying and allows the director, in her own phrase, to push her up, if he can be bothered. She has been described as "a receptacle for every conceivable imagination", and this is her strength in cinematic terms. Her cinematic presence is like the dress "the colour of time" that she wore in another of Jacques Demy's fantasies, Peau d'Âne, on which different images and colours were projected. Her effortless blankness allows her to take the imprint of her viewers' fantasies, and so she has achieved a reputation as one of the sexiest film actresses ever to grace the screen.
Belle de Jour (1967) has a reputation for being one of the sexiest films ever made, simply because Deneuve behaves throughout like a pre-adolescent girl. Through the prism of the 21st century, the film seems oddly contrived; what is now a cliche - the child who, subjected to the sexual advances of an adult, then becomes a frigid woman who is only turned on by squalor - is coyly exploited as a series of fetishistic images that juxtapose her fantasy life with her actual life. As Séverine Serizy, Deneuve moves through the imagery of what are meant to be her own fantasies like a sleepwalker. By her own account, director Lous Buñuel could not relate to her at all and never told her what he wanted. Unconsciously, she gave him what he wanted, which was as little as possible. The fantasies were his, after all.
The decision to have her dressed by Yves Saint-Laurent adds a bizarre dimension to the nonexistent plot; we seem to be living within the pages of a glossy magazine, with product placement everywhere. Everywhere Séverine goes, she is conspicuous by her catwalk presence, from her shiny patent leather pumps to the helmet that holds in her mane of Barbie-doll hair. The sex scenes in the brothel consist of her stripping to the full armour of suspender-belt, knickers, stockings and padded brassiere, and allowing ugly men to kiss her. In one extraordinarily unsexy sequence, she is required to process through the rooms of a ducal chateau dressed in nothing but a cloak of black georgette and a crown of white roses. She trots ahead of the camera like a lamb to the slaughter. She should have used a body double; it is typical of her passive obedience that she didn't. Lauren Bacall would never have done that for anyone, would never have stripped and had them shoot her bare arse from the back as she trotted through take after take. The Hawksian woman would have decked any man who asked her.
Buñuel used Deneuve again in Tristana (1970), a far better film than Belle de Jour but much less successful. Again, his real subject was not Tristana but himself. What activates the film is Buñuel's deep hostility to the hypocrisy of Spanish provincial society. Deneuve acts as the surrogate for his child self, the innocent orphan who is seduced by her guardian, who tries to express her own sexuality with a younger man who uses her; mutilated and helpless, she is forced to regularise a union with the man who took her virginity. What remains in the memory is not the shocking last scene or Deneuve's performance, but Buñuel's evocation of 1930s Toledo, seen as through the lens of childhood, wonderfully shot by José F Aguayo. Again, Deneuve's impassivity is exactly what Buñuel needs. It is the still point in his turning world.
Lauren Bacall's film career foundered in the 1950s, and never recovered. She has since played cameo parts and had considerable success on the stage [including Tony Awards for the musicals Applause and Woman of the Year]. Meanwhile, Catherine Deneuve has been, as well as the face of the republic, the face of Chanel No 5, and most recently the face of cosmetics companies MAC and L'Oréal.
The Hawksian woman was an idea that flourished at a time of crisis, in the depression and during the war, when the full energies of women were needed if they were to survive. After the war she was supplanted by the female eunuch, weighed down with huge hair and false eyelashes, unequal to any challenge - all things to all men and nothing to herself.
For further reading...
Lauren Bacall has written two memoirs: By Myself was first published in 1978 and an updated edition was released in 2005, under the title By Myself...and Then Some. By Myself is an exemplar of the memoir genre. Bacall is candid and honest - sometimes brutally - about her life, her marriage to Bogart in 1945 until his death from cancer in 1957; her later marriage to and divorce from Jason Robards; her experience as a Jewish model in the garment district in the early 1940s; the sudden rise and slow ebb of her film career; and her very unexpected success in two Broadway musicals.
Bacall's second book, Now, was published in 1994 and in its introduction, she is quick to point out that it is not a sequel to By Myself. Rather, Now is Bacall looking at her life as it was in 1994, rather than a review of everything that had happened since 1978. Each book is a delightful read; Bacall is one of the few memoirists who doesn't use a ghost writer and doesn't need one. She simply tells her (remarkable) story.
Maria DiBattista writes about many Hawksian women in Fast Talking Dames (2001), a look at women's roles in films of the 1930s. Chronologically, she doesn't get to Bacall's 1944 debut, but many Hawks-directed performances are examined, including Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings, Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.
Howard Hawks's second wife, Nancy - aka Slim - the one who discovered Lauren Bacall on the cover of Harper's Bazaar, and on whom Bacall's character in To Have and Have Not was based, penned a memoir, Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life, as Slim Keith. I haven't read it yet - though I did pick up a copy last weekend - but, according to Ms. Bacall, "This is the story of an American original - a woman of rare wit, intelligence, and beauty. Some of the most important men of our time were drawn to Slim Keith; to know why, one need only read this thoroughly entertaining book." And why would Lauren Bacall lie to me on a dust jacket?
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
On DVD This Tuesday...
Not too much to get excited about this week. A few new films that I haven't seen but look interesting. That's about it.
Complete list available here, at dvdaf.com (DVD Aficionado).
Conversations with Other Women (2005, Hans Canosa) has Aaron Eckhart, who impressed me in both Thank You for Smoking and The Black Dahlia last year, thereby absolving himself of ever having made Possession, which I hated.
Idiocracy (2006, Mike Judge) was unceremoniously dumped into theaters, with virtually no publicity. Just like Office Space.
The Illusioninst (2006, Neil Burger) has Edward Norton performingmagic tricks illusions! I have no other reason for mentioning the film. It just looks neat.
The Night Listener (2006, Patrick Stettner) is based on a novel by Armistead Maupin, creator of Tales of the City. The film features Toni Collette, Sandra Oh and Rory Culkin (the good Culkin; the one from You Can Count On Me.). It's also got Robin Williams, whose presence has the potential of destroying any film at any time.
Complete list available here, at dvdaf.com (DVD Aficionado).
Conversations with Other Women (2005, Hans Canosa) has Aaron Eckhart, who impressed me in both Thank You for Smoking and The Black Dahlia last year, thereby absolving himself of ever having made Possession, which I hated.
Idiocracy (2006, Mike Judge) was unceremoniously dumped into theaters, with virtually no publicity. Just like Office Space.
The Illusioninst (2006, Neil Burger) has Edward Norton performing
The Night Listener (2006, Patrick Stettner) is based on a novel by Armistead Maupin, creator of Tales of the City. The film features Toni Collette, Sandra Oh and Rory Culkin (the good Culkin; the one from You Can Count On Me.). It's also got Robin Williams, whose presence has the potential of destroying any film at any time.
Saturday, January 6, 2007
The London Times on Bogie and Bacall
Here's looking at you with fresh eyes
Ian Johns, London Times, 28 Dec 2006 [with my comments in blue]
A rare version of a Bogart and Bacall classic at the NFT shows the pair as you’ve never seen them before
Big-screen romances, real, fabricated and imagined, have often been problematical for Hollywood. Nowadays constant media scrutiny can blur celebrities into a single entity, so Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie morph into “Brangelina”. Or protestations of love can seem phoney: witness Tom Cruise terrorising Oprah Winfrey’s upholstery with his ardent displays of love for Katie Holmes.
Today’s celebrities also can’t help but keep picking at the scab we call love. Maybe the pool of suitable mates for the rich and famous is smaller than we imagine so you’ll always find Hollywood couples — Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend, Jake Gyllenhaal and Kirsten Dunst, Orlando Bloom and Kate Bosworth — that are are off, on, off, on and somewhere in between.
Yet there’s one Hollywood romance, whose on-screen chemistry was palpable, that continues to be held in high regard. It’s therefore a surprise to find in next month’s National Film Theatre season celebrating the careers of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall that they made only four films together. Perhaps it’s because their first two screen partnerships were so sensational. Perhaps that’s why it’s so thrilling that the NFT have got hold of rare footage of the screen couple in one of their most famous films, which very few will have seen before.
Bacall exploded on the screen in 1944 opposite Bogart in To Have and Have Not, based on an Ernest Hemingway novel that the director Howard Hawks tweaked into a sexier, sassier Casablanca. Bogart plays an expatriate American fishing boat captain lending a grudging hand to French Resistance leaders. Instead of Dooley Wilson crooning "As Time Goes By," it’s Hoagy Carmichael banging out a honky-tonk "Am I Blue." Instead of Bogie offering “Here’ s looking at you, kid” to Ingrid Bergman it’s Bacall, as a nightclub chanteuse, offering Bogie, “I’m hard to get; all you have to do is ask.” [Jean Arthur said virtually the same line to Cary Grant five years earlier at the end of Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings.]
Hawks’s wife Nancy [aka "Slim"] had seen Bacall’s picture on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and recommended that he sign the 18-year-old to a contract. Bacall was so nervous on set that she trembled. To conceal it, Hawks had her lower her head almost to chest level and stare up at her co-star. And so “The Look” was born. Magically, her terror had photographed as insolence, and Warner Bros lost no time in promoting its “Slinky! Sultry! Sensational!” new star.
“Her debut chimed with a changing Hollywood,” says Richard Schickel, the film critic, documentary maker and co-author of the recently published Bogie: A Celebration of Humphrey Bogart (Aurum). “Hollywood was responding to a darker, more cynical wartime mood and Bogart and Bacall fitted into that mood.”
That’s also partly why Bogart had finally broken through as a star after ten years in supporting roles. “In many of his early pictures he was woefully miscast as a ‘tough guy’, when he was essentially a romantic hiding his true nature under a gruff, sardonic shell,” Schickel says. Such qualities can be glimpsed in the rarely seen Black Legion (1937), a social-comment melodrama with Bogart as a digruntled factory worker sucked into a Ku Klux Klan-like vigilantism.
Bogart's early "tough guy" roles include the films The Petrified Forest, San Quentin and The Roaring Twenties - to name just a few. To call Bogart as "woefully miscast" in these movies isn't just untrue, it's insulting Bogart's performances in gangster pictures are on a par with those of the masters of the genre, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, particularly in the three pictures I've just named.
Thanks to George Raft turning down the 1941 films High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, Bogart was able fully to emerge as the laconic, essentially decent loner, a figure he consolidated with Casablanca. “He seemed to embody this mix of dashed dreams and soured expectations but with a dormant idealism that could be reawakened by a good woman or a good idea,” Schickel says. “No wonder disaffected students in the Sixties embraced him.”
By the time he met Bacall he was a huge star. She, by contrast, was an unknown novice for whom Hawks had Pygmalion dreams. He dressed her, advised her and, through The Look and insouciant style he gave her, she turned the notion of a sweet young thing upside down: “If you need anything, just whistle,” she coyly tells Bogart. “You do know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”
If every scene between Bogie and Bergman exuded sheer romanticism in Casablanca, the Bogie-Bacall encounters in To Have and Have Not ooze carnal complicity.
To Have and Have works almost entirely because of Bogie and Bacall's screen chemistry. I'm pretty sure - I don't know where I read this, so I can't look it up - her role was built up and that her character stayed in the movie longer than originally planned because of their chemistry. Hemingway himself had long said that his novel was unfilmable, and in a way, he was right. The film doesn't exactly fall apart at the end, it just sort of runs out of steam; I can never remember how the film ends. Which at least keeps it fresh from viewing to viewing.
In a small role Bacall stole the show and Bogart’s heart. At the time he was in a turbulent third marriage, to the actress Mayo Methot; they kept a carpenter on standby to repair damage to their home caused in drunken fights. By the time Hawks had reunited Bogart and Bacall for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946), they were about to be married. As gumshoe Philip Marlowe and society dame Vivian Sternwood, the pair had even more of the suggestive banter that lights up To Have and Have Not.
For years, people have puzzled over the arabesque plot involving two blackmail victims, a rich woman and her strange thumb-sucking sister, and a nervy array of nocturnal heavies and six murders. Chandler even joked that he didn’t know whodunnit.
The NFT season includes a 1944 studio draft of the film, which was screened only to servicemen. Although it has more detailed explanations of the famously complex plot, it has fewer of the snappy Bogart and Bacall moments that Hawks shot a year later, including the restaurant scene in which the pair spin an elaborate discussion filled with double entendres about their fondness for racehorses.
In the end Hawks’s released version is less a reading of Chandler than a tribute to the potency of the Bogart-Bacall partnership. Even Leigh Brackett, who co-wrote the screenplay, said that it wasn’t so much the dialogue but the electricity of the two stars working in complete accord that propelled the film to classic status. Catch Bacall’s turn as a spoiled, acid-tongued but likeable woman in the Paul Newman detective drama Harper (1966) and it could be a homage to her younger self in The Big Sleep.
Hawks loved the film, but hated Bacall’s continuing romance with Bogart. No longer able to influence her, he had Warner Bros sell her, for a reputed $1 million, which turned her into a contract player who was assigned to whatever came along. Her subsequent career often involved suspension by the studio for refusing roles. [I think he means that Hawks sold Bacall's contract to Warners - otherwise, that sentence makes no sense.]
Away from the film set, she was a devoted wife, caring and comforting Bogart when needed. “I married a man who expected me to be there,” she once said. She kept working in supporting roles — How to Marry a Millionaire and Written in the Wind among them — even though Bogart stipulated that she should not go away on location.
They made two more films together. Dark Passage (1947) is their most conventional movie, a grim film noir with Bogart as a framed fugitive (off-camera for half the running time) and Bacall as the woman who believes in his innocence. [Bogart is off-camera for the first third of Dark Passage because it is shot from his point of view, making it one of the least conventional of the Bogart/Bacall quartet. What the hell is with this guy?] In Key Largo (1948), they are part of a group taken hostage by gangsters in a hotel. Neither star is as intriguing as Edward G. Robinson’s criminal or the Oscar-winning Claire Trevor as his mistress, but the silent rapport between them is fascinating to watch.
“As a couple they accepted each other,” Schickel says. “He never tried to mould her into some womanly ideal that often tempts a husband some 25 years older than his wife. And she accepted his boozy lifestyle with a close circle of friends. I think their stable family life may have even liberated him as an actor. He began to take risks at an age when other stars would have been content with a successful screen persona.”
Schickel cites Bogart as a murder suspect with a frighteningly violent temper in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950): “What’s remarkable about this performance is that Bogart never judges his character. As far as he’s concerned he’s completely normal, which is why he’s so chilling in the role.”
The film does indeed show that Bogart was a great actor, not simply the icon that he became after his death from cancer in 1957. As Schickel points out, every actor needs at least one film that somehow transcends time and has a continuing claim on the affections of successive generations. For Bogart that film was Casablanca. But he proved on screen that there was more to him than a cynical romanticism artfully wreathed in cigarette smoke.
Casablanca, while Bogart's most famous film, is hardly the only one to pass the test of time. At the very least, I'd add The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen (his only Oscar-winning role, maddeningly unavailable on DVD), Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Caine Mutiny (which is now out of print), and the lesser-known High Sierra. That's not to say that every Bogart film is an automatic classic. Tokyo Joe was surprisingly uninteresting - especially for a film Bogart produced. And The Two Mrs. Carrolls is to be avoided at all costs.
Bogart and Bacall also appeared in a 1955 television production of The Petrified Forest. Bogie reprised his role as Duke Mantee, which he had created on Broadway 20 years earlier; Bettie Bacall took the role that was played by her childhood idol Bette Davis in the 1936 film.
A theatrical screening of any of these films is an opportunity not to be missed. This is especially true for the 1944 pre-release version of The Big Sleep, as it is currently only available on the region 1 DVD.
Ian Johns, London Times, 28 Dec 2006 [with my comments in blue]
A rare version of a Bogart and Bacall classic at the NFT shows the pair as you’ve never seen them before
Big-screen romances, real, fabricated and imagined, have often been problematical for Hollywood. Nowadays constant media scrutiny can blur celebrities into a single entity, so Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie morph into “Brangelina”. Or protestations of love can seem phoney: witness Tom Cruise terrorising Oprah Winfrey’s upholstery with his ardent displays of love for Katie Holmes.
Today’s celebrities also can’t help but keep picking at the scab we call love. Maybe the pool of suitable mates for the rich and famous is smaller than we imagine so you’ll always find Hollywood couples — Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend, Jake Gyllenhaal and Kirsten Dunst, Orlando Bloom and Kate Bosworth — that are are off, on, off, on and somewhere in between.
Yet there’s one Hollywood romance, whose on-screen chemistry was palpable, that continues to be held in high regard. It’s therefore a surprise to find in next month’s National Film Theatre season celebrating the careers of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall that they made only four films together. Perhaps it’s because their first two screen partnerships were so sensational. Perhaps that’s why it’s so thrilling that the NFT have got hold of rare footage of the screen couple in one of their most famous films, which very few will have seen before.
Bacall exploded on the screen in 1944 opposite Bogart in To Have and Have Not, based on an Ernest Hemingway novel that the director Howard Hawks tweaked into a sexier, sassier Casablanca. Bogart plays an expatriate American fishing boat captain lending a grudging hand to French Resistance leaders. Instead of Dooley Wilson crooning "As Time Goes By," it’s Hoagy Carmichael banging out a honky-tonk "Am I Blue." Instead of Bogie offering “Here’ s looking at you, kid” to Ingrid Bergman it’s Bacall, as a nightclub chanteuse, offering Bogie, “I’m hard to get; all you have to do is ask.” [Jean Arthur said virtually the same line to Cary Grant five years earlier at the end of Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings.]Hawks’s wife Nancy [aka "Slim"] had seen Bacall’s picture on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and recommended that he sign the 18-year-old to a contract. Bacall was so nervous on set that she trembled. To conceal it, Hawks had her lower her head almost to chest level and stare up at her co-star. And so “The Look” was born. Magically, her terror had photographed as insolence, and Warner Bros lost no time in promoting its “Slinky! Sultry! Sensational!” new star.
“Her debut chimed with a changing Hollywood,” says Richard Schickel, the film critic, documentary maker and co-author of the recently published Bogie: A Celebration of Humphrey Bogart (Aurum). “Hollywood was responding to a darker, more cynical wartime mood and Bogart and Bacall fitted into that mood.”
That’s also partly why Bogart had finally broken through as a star after ten years in supporting roles. “In many of his early pictures he was woefully miscast as a ‘tough guy’, when he was essentially a romantic hiding his true nature under a gruff, sardonic shell,” Schickel says. Such qualities can be glimpsed in the rarely seen Black Legion (1937), a social-comment melodrama with Bogart as a digruntled factory worker sucked into a Ku Klux Klan-like vigilantism.
Bogart's early "tough guy" roles include the films The Petrified Forest, San Quentin and The Roaring Twenties - to name just a few. To call Bogart as "woefully miscast" in these movies isn't just untrue, it's insulting Bogart's performances in gangster pictures are on a par with those of the masters of the genre, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, particularly in the three pictures I've just named.
Thanks to George Raft turning down the 1941 films High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, Bogart was able fully to emerge as the laconic, essentially decent loner, a figure he consolidated with Casablanca. “He seemed to embody this mix of dashed dreams and soured expectations but with a dormant idealism that could be reawakened by a good woman or a good idea,” Schickel says. “No wonder disaffected students in the Sixties embraced him.”
By the time he met Bacall he was a huge star. She, by contrast, was an unknown novice for whom Hawks had Pygmalion dreams. He dressed her, advised her and, through The Look and insouciant style he gave her, she turned the notion of a sweet young thing upside down: “If you need anything, just whistle,” she coyly tells Bogart. “You do know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”
If every scene between Bogie and Bergman exuded sheer romanticism in Casablanca, the Bogie-Bacall encounters in To Have and Have Not ooze carnal complicity.
To Have and Have works almost entirely because of Bogie and Bacall's screen chemistry. I'm pretty sure - I don't know where I read this, so I can't look it up - her role was built up and that her character stayed in the movie longer than originally planned because of their chemistry. Hemingway himself had long said that his novel was unfilmable, and in a way, he was right. The film doesn't exactly fall apart at the end, it just sort of runs out of steam; I can never remember how the film ends. Which at least keeps it fresh from viewing to viewing.
In a small role Bacall stole the show and Bogart’s heart. At the time he was in a turbulent third marriage, to the actress Mayo Methot; they kept a carpenter on standby to repair damage to their home caused in drunken fights. By the time Hawks had reunited Bogart and Bacall for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946), they were about to be married. As gumshoe Philip Marlowe and society dame Vivian Sternwood, the pair had even more of the suggestive banter that lights up To Have and Have Not.
For years, people have puzzled over the arabesque plot involving two blackmail victims, a rich woman and her strange thumb-sucking sister, and a nervy array of nocturnal heavies and six murders. Chandler even joked that he didn’t know whodunnit.
The NFT season includes a 1944 studio draft of the film, which was screened only to servicemen. Although it has more detailed explanations of the famously complex plot, it has fewer of the snappy Bogart and Bacall moments that Hawks shot a year later, including the restaurant scene in which the pair spin an elaborate discussion filled with double entendres about their fondness for racehorses.
In the end Hawks’s released version is less a reading of Chandler than a tribute to the potency of the Bogart-Bacall partnership. Even Leigh Brackett, who co-wrote the screenplay, said that it wasn’t so much the dialogue but the electricity of the two stars working in complete accord that propelled the film to classic status. Catch Bacall’s turn as a spoiled, acid-tongued but likeable woman in the Paul Newman detective drama Harper (1966) and it could be a homage to her younger self in The Big Sleep.
Hawks loved the film, but hated Bacall’s continuing romance with Bogart. No longer able to influence her, he had Warner Bros sell her, for a reputed $1 million, which turned her into a contract player who was assigned to whatever came along. Her subsequent career often involved suspension by the studio for refusing roles. [I think he means that Hawks sold Bacall's contract to Warners - otherwise, that sentence makes no sense.]
Away from the film set, she was a devoted wife, caring and comforting Bogart when needed. “I married a man who expected me to be there,” she once said. She kept working in supporting roles — How to Marry a Millionaire and Written in the Wind among them — even though Bogart stipulated that she should not go away on location.
They made two more films together. Dark Passage (1947) is their most conventional movie, a grim film noir with Bogart as a framed fugitive (off-camera for half the running time) and Bacall as the woman who believes in his innocence. [Bogart is off-camera for the first third of Dark Passage because it is shot from his point of view, making it one of the least conventional of the Bogart/Bacall quartet. What the hell is with this guy?] In Key Largo (1948), they are part of a group taken hostage by gangsters in a hotel. Neither star is as intriguing as Edward G. Robinson’s criminal or the Oscar-winning Claire Trevor as his mistress, but the silent rapport between them is fascinating to watch.
“As a couple they accepted each other,” Schickel says. “He never tried to mould her into some womanly ideal that often tempts a husband some 25 years older than his wife. And she accepted his boozy lifestyle with a close circle of friends. I think their stable family life may have even liberated him as an actor. He began to take risks at an age when other stars would have been content with a successful screen persona.”
Schickel cites Bogart as a murder suspect with a frighteningly violent temper in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950): “What’s remarkable about this performance is that Bogart never judges his character. As far as he’s concerned he’s completely normal, which is why he’s so chilling in the role.”
The film does indeed show that Bogart was a great actor, not simply the icon that he became after his death from cancer in 1957. As Schickel points out, every actor needs at least one film that somehow transcends time and has a continuing claim on the affections of successive generations. For Bogart that film was Casablanca. But he proved on screen that there was more to him than a cynical romanticism artfully wreathed in cigarette smoke.
Casablanca, while Bogart's most famous film, is hardly the only one to pass the test of time. At the very least, I'd add The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen (his only Oscar-winning role, maddeningly unavailable on DVD), Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Caine Mutiny (which is now out of print), and the lesser-known High Sierra. That's not to say that every Bogart film is an automatic classic. Tokyo Joe was surprisingly uninteresting - especially for a film Bogart produced. And The Two Mrs. Carrolls is to be avoided at all costs.
Bogart and Bacall also appeared in a 1955 television production of The Petrified Forest. Bogie reprised his role as Duke Mantee, which he had created on Broadway 20 years earlier; Bettie Bacall took the role that was played by her childhood idol Bette Davis in the 1936 film.
A theatrical screening of any of these films is an opportunity not to be missed. This is especially true for the 1944 pre-release version of The Big Sleep, as it is currently only available on the region 1 DVD.
Friday, January 5, 2007
5 Schemers Deliciously Played by Barbara Stanwyck
I've always loved Christmas in Connecticut, despite its many flaws. When re-watching it last month, I realized that Stanwyck may be the main problem (well, Stanwyck and the script). She was cast as a screwy dame who constantly relies on men to get her out of jams. That's all fine and good if you're Carole Lombard. But Stanwyck was always best when she was the one calling the shots:
Florence "Faith" Fallon in The Miracle Woman (1931, Frank Capra) was loosely based on the very successful evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who lost a great deal of credibility when she allegedly faked her own kidnapping in 1926. That's not in The Miracle Woman, though. Stanwyck played a fraudulent evangelist who travels the country with a con man, faking miracles and reaping profits. Hopefully, the presence of Stanwyck and Capra will lead to the film's DVD release, especially since I taped my copy off of Turner Classic Movies during a thunderstorm, resulting in a very poor print.
Lily Powers in Baby Face (1933, Alfred E. Green) starts out being whored out by her father in his speakeasy. She escapes him, flees to New York and - thanks to the teachings of Nietzsche - sleeps her way to the top of a corporation. As the tagline read: "She climbed the ladder of success - wrong by wrong!" Only the censored version of Baby Face was available for decades until an original, uncut print was found in 2004. You can now watch both versions on the Forbidden Hollywood Collection from TCM available on Warner Home Video.
Jean Harrington in The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges) gets her heart broken by beer baron Charles "Hopsy" Pike (Henry Fonda). What's a girl to do? Pretend to be an English Lady, so Pike will fall in love with her again, so she can dump him, so he'll run back to her, of course.
On the day she gets fired from her job as a newspaper columnist, Ann Mitchell in Meet John Doe (1941, Capra) submits a fake suicide note - signed "John Doe" - for her final column. The article gets so much attention that she convinces her editors to re-hire and to hire a bum (Gary Cooper) to act the part of John Doe to keep the gimmick going. What could possibly go wrong?
Stanwyck's greatest role was as one of the most fatales femmes in the entire noir cycle: The amoral Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder) seduces insurance man Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and contrives a scheme to defraud his company by offing her husband (Tom Powers). Only then does the Neff find out what happened to the first Mrs. Dietrichson.
Florence "Faith" Fallon in The Miracle Woman (1931, Frank Capra) was loosely based on the very successful evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who lost a great deal of credibility when she allegedly faked her own kidnapping in 1926. That's not in The Miracle Woman, though. Stanwyck played a fraudulent evangelist who travels the country with a con man, faking miracles and reaping profits. Hopefully, the presence of Stanwyck and Capra will lead to the film's DVD release, especially since I taped my copy off of Turner Classic Movies during a thunderstorm, resulting in a very poor print.
Lily Powers in Baby Face (1933, Alfred E. Green) starts out being whored out by her father in his speakeasy. She escapes him, flees to New York and - thanks to the teachings of Nietzsche - sleeps her way to the top of a corporation. As the tagline read: "She climbed the ladder of success - wrong by wrong!" Only the censored version of Baby Face was available for decades until an original, uncut print was found in 2004. You can now watch both versions on the Forbidden Hollywood Collection from TCM available on Warner Home Video.
Jean Harrington in The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges) gets her heart broken by beer baron Charles "Hopsy" Pike (Henry Fonda). What's a girl to do? Pretend to be an English Lady, so Pike will fall in love with her again, so she can dump him, so he'll run back to her, of course.
On the day she gets fired from her job as a newspaper columnist, Ann Mitchell in Meet John Doe (1941, Capra) submits a fake suicide note - signed "John Doe" - for her final column. The article gets so much attention that she convinces her editors to re-hire and to hire a bum (Gary Cooper) to act the part of John Doe to keep the gimmick going. What could possibly go wrong?
Stanwyck's greatest role was as one of the most fatales femmes in the entire noir cycle: The amoral Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder) seduces insurance man Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and contrives a scheme to defraud his company by offing her husband (Tom Powers). Only then does the Neff find out what happened to the first Mrs. Dietrichson.
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Boxed Set-O-Rama!!!
Most collectors of DVDs have learned by now that boxed sets are the way to go. For example, The Rock Hudson & Doris Day Romance Collection contains three films: Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers. You also get a bonus Doris Day CD. A little online research (courtesy dvdaf.com) tell us that the set can be purchased for $23.02 at buy.com (all prices mentioned herein exclude shipping). At DeepDiscountDVD.com, each film goes for $9.43, totaling $28.29. And you don't get the bonus CD. Usually, the more films in a collection, the better the deal. I use this example because it only contains three movies and I just got it for Christmas (thanks Mom!).
Some great sets are scheduled for the future so, in the interest of saving money and collecting neat little cardboard cases, here are some highlights:
The Signature Collection: Robert Mitchum (Warner Home Video, 1/23/07)
Angel Face (1952, Otto Preminger)
The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969, Burt Kennedy)
Home from the Hill (1960, Vincente Minnelli)
Macao (1952, Josef von Sternberg)
The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960)
The Yakuza (1975, Sydney Pollack)
Angel Face! Finally!
Monsters and Madmen (Criterion, 1/30/07)
The Atomic Submarine (1959, Spencer Gordon Bennett)
Corridors of Blood (1958, Robert Day)
First Man Into Space (1959, Day)
Grip of the Strangler (1958, Day)
Alfred Hitchcock: 3-Disc Collector's Edition (Lionsgate, 2/6/07)
The Manxman (1929)
Murder! (1930)
Rich and Strange (1932)
The Ring (1927)
The Skin Game (1931)
These films have all been hanging around the grey market for years. Hopefully, this will be an official release with halfway decent prints.
Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist (Criterion, 2/13/07)
Body and Soul (1925, Oscar Micheaux)
Borderline (1930, Kenneth MacPherson)
The Emperor Jones (1933, Dudley Murphy)
Jericho (1937, Thornton Freeland)
Native Land (1942, Leo Hurwitz & Paul Strand)
The Proud Valley (1940, Pen Tennyson)
Sanders of the River (1935, Zoltan Korda)
Marquee Musicals: The Alice Faye Collection (20th Century Fox, 2/20/07)
The Gang's All Here (1943, Busby Berkeley)
Lillian Russell (1940, Irving Cummings)
On the Avenue (1937, Roy Del Ruth)
That Night in Rio (1941, Cummings)
Here's hoping that Marquee Musicals will be a new series in the same vein as the indispensible Fox Film Noir collection.
Hemingway Classics Collection (20th Century Fox, 3/6/07)
A Farewell to Arms (1957, Charles Vidor)
Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962, Martin Ritt)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952, Henry King)
The Sun Also Rises (1957, King)
Under My Skin (1950, Jean Negulesco)
Literary Classics Collection (Warner Home Video, 3/6/07)
Billy Budd (1962, Peter Ustinov)
Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951, Raoul Walsh)
Madame Bovary (1949, Minnelli)
The Prisoner of Zenda (1937, John Cromwell)
The Prisoner of Zenda (1952, Richard Thorpe)
The Three Musketeers (1948, George Sidney)
I'm happy to see both Prisoner of Zendas get released (get it?) - and they will be available separately as a twofer. The remake is good, but the original is great.
W.C. Fields Comedy Collection, Volume 2 (Universal, 3/20/07)
Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935, Clyde Bruckman)
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941, Edward F. Kline)
The Old Fashioned Way (1934, William Beaudine)
Poppy (1936, A. Edward Sutherland)
You're Telling Me! (1934, Erle C. Kenton)
The Signature Collection: Errol Flynn, Vol. 2 (Warner Home Video, 3/27/07)
Adventures of Don Juan (1948, Vincent Sherman)
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936, Michael Curtiz)
The Dawn Patrol (1938, Edmund Goulding)
Dive Bomber (1941, Curtiz)
Gentleman Jim (1942, Raoul Walsh)
The first Flynn Signature Collection (Captain Blood, Dodge City, The Private Lives of Elizabeth & Essex, The Sea Hawk, They Died with Their Boots On, The Adventures of Errol Flynn) is a real treat and I am very much looking forward to the second. Once this collection is released, Four's a Crowd will remain the only collaboration of the eight features Flynn made with Olivia de Havilland not available on DVD.
The Doris Day Collection, Vol. 2 (Warner Home Video, 4/10/07)
By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953, David Butler)
I'll See You in My Dreams (1951, Michael Curtiz)
Lucky Me (1954, Jack Donohue)
My Dream is Yours (1949, Curtiz; animated sequence by Friz Freleng)
On Moonlight Bay (1951, Roy Del Ruth)
Romance on the High Seas (1948, Curtiz)
In her film debut, the funny Romance on the High Seas, Day plays a gum-smacking, sassy young chick - decidedly not the type she would come to embrace in later years. My Dream Is Yours contains a mixed animation/live-action sequence with Day and Jack Carson - dressed as bunnies - singing a kid to sleep...to the tune of Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody."
No, really.
Some great sets are scheduled for the future so, in the interest of saving money and collecting neat little cardboard cases, here are some highlights:
The Signature Collection: Robert Mitchum (Warner Home Video, 1/23/07)
Angel Face (1952, Otto Preminger)
The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969, Burt Kennedy)
Home from the Hill (1960, Vincente Minnelli)
Macao (1952, Josef von Sternberg)
The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960)
The Yakuza (1975, Sydney Pollack)
Angel Face! Finally!
Monsters and Madmen (Criterion, 1/30/07)
The Atomic Submarine (1959, Spencer Gordon Bennett)
Corridors of Blood (1958, Robert Day)
First Man Into Space (1959, Day)
Grip of the Strangler (1958, Day)
Alfred Hitchcock: 3-Disc Collector's Edition (Lionsgate, 2/6/07)
The Manxman (1929)
Murder! (1930)
Rich and Strange (1932)
The Ring (1927)
The Skin Game (1931)
These films have all been hanging around the grey market for years. Hopefully, this will be an official release with halfway decent prints.
Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist (Criterion, 2/13/07)
Body and Soul (1925, Oscar Micheaux)
Borderline (1930, Kenneth MacPherson)
The Emperor Jones (1933, Dudley Murphy)
Jericho (1937, Thornton Freeland)
Native Land (1942, Leo Hurwitz & Paul Strand)
The Proud Valley (1940, Pen Tennyson)
Sanders of the River (1935, Zoltan Korda)
Marquee Musicals: The Alice Faye Collection (20th Century Fox, 2/20/07)
The Gang's All Here (1943, Busby Berkeley)
Lillian Russell (1940, Irving Cummings)
On the Avenue (1937, Roy Del Ruth)
That Night in Rio (1941, Cummings)
Here's hoping that Marquee Musicals will be a new series in the same vein as the indispensible Fox Film Noir collection.
Hemingway Classics Collection (20th Century Fox, 3/6/07)
A Farewell to Arms (1957, Charles Vidor)
Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962, Martin Ritt)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952, Henry King)
The Sun Also Rises (1957, King)
Under My Skin (1950, Jean Negulesco)
Literary Classics Collection (Warner Home Video, 3/6/07)
Billy Budd (1962, Peter Ustinov)
Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951, Raoul Walsh)
Madame Bovary (1949, Minnelli)
The Prisoner of Zenda (1937, John Cromwell)
The Prisoner of Zenda (1952, Richard Thorpe)
The Three Musketeers (1948, George Sidney)
I'm happy to see both Prisoner of Zendas get released (get it?) - and they will be available separately as a twofer. The remake is good, but the original is great.
W.C. Fields Comedy Collection, Volume 2 (Universal, 3/20/07)
Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935, Clyde Bruckman)
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941, Edward F. Kline)
The Old Fashioned Way (1934, William Beaudine)
Poppy (1936, A. Edward Sutherland)
You're Telling Me! (1934, Erle C. Kenton)
The Signature Collection: Errol Flynn, Vol. 2 (Warner Home Video, 3/27/07)
Adventures of Don Juan (1948, Vincent Sherman)
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936, Michael Curtiz)
The Dawn Patrol (1938, Edmund Goulding)
Dive Bomber (1941, Curtiz)
Gentleman Jim (1942, Raoul Walsh)
The first Flynn Signature Collection (Captain Blood, Dodge City, The Private Lives of Elizabeth & Essex, The Sea Hawk, They Died with Their Boots On, The Adventures of Errol Flynn) is a real treat and I am very much looking forward to the second. Once this collection is released, Four's a Crowd will remain the only collaboration of the eight features Flynn made with Olivia de Havilland not available on DVD.
The Doris Day Collection, Vol. 2 (Warner Home Video, 4/10/07)
By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953, David Butler)
I'll See You in My Dreams (1951, Michael Curtiz)
Lucky Me (1954, Jack Donohue)
My Dream is Yours (1949, Curtiz; animated sequence by Friz Freleng)
On Moonlight Bay (1951, Roy Del Ruth)
Romance on the High Seas (1948, Curtiz)
In her film debut, the funny Romance on the High Seas, Day plays a gum-smacking, sassy young chick - decidedly not the type she would come to embrace in later years. My Dream Is Yours contains a mixed animation/live-action sequence with Day and Jack Carson - dressed as bunnies - singing a kid to sleep...to the tune of Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody."
No, really.
Very Short Reviews: United 93 and Babel
United 93 (2006, Paul Greengrass): 7.5/10
Everything that takes place on the ground works, effectively conveying the confusion, disbelief and horror of the events of that day. The scenes on the plane are less effective. It turns out Greengrass's version of what probably happened is what everyone else assumes probably happened.
Babel (2006, Alejandro González Iñárritu): 8/10
Babel has a lesson: Even though we may speak different languages, we're all still human beings. Also, don't shoot at cars. Cate Blanchett is as good as ever, but the film belongs to Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi. Brad Pitt plays the same Average-Joe-stuck-in-an-extraordinary-situation character he played in Se7en. He's better this time, but that's not saying a whole heckuva lot.
Everything that takes place on the ground works, effectively conveying the confusion, disbelief and horror of the events of that day. The scenes on the plane are less effective. It turns out Greengrass's version of what probably happened is what everyone else assumes probably happened.
Babel (2006, Alejandro González Iñárritu): 8/10
Babel has a lesson: Even though we may speak different languages, we're all still human beings. Also, don't shoot at cars. Cate Blanchett is as good as ever, but the film belongs to Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi. Brad Pitt plays the same Average-Joe-stuck-in-an-extraordinary-situation character he played in Se7en. He's better this time, but that's not saying a whole heckuva lot.
On DVD This Tuesday...
I'm posting the DVD updates more sporadically than I had planned at first. December 12th saw the releases of Bugsy, a Dean Martin double-feature of Who Was That Lady and How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life), two James Bond sets and many others. But since I haven't seen any of those movies, I couldln't recommend them. At least, that was my logic at the time. In retrospect, it does seem rather flawed.
December 26th brought us Brian DePalma's flawed-but-fascinating (and severely underrated) The Black Dahlia. Nothing else that week really interested me. And come to think of it, I missed a golden opportunity to write about boxing movies or boxed sets. Damn.
Now on to today...
Okay, there's nothing of much interest today, either.
A lower-priced, single-disc non-Special Edition of Ridley Scott's Alien (and doesn't that description set your heart a-racin'?)
And Sparkle, undoubtedly getting released thanks to Dreamgirls.
December 26th brought us Brian DePalma's flawed-but-fascinating (and severely underrated) The Black Dahlia. Nothing else that week really interested me. And come to think of it, I missed a golden opportunity to write about boxing movies or boxed sets. Damn.
Now on to today...
Okay, there's nothing of much interest today, either.
A lower-priced, single-disc non-Special Edition of Ridley Scott's Alien (and doesn't that description set your heart a-racin'?)
And Sparkle, undoubtedly getting released thanks to Dreamgirls.
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