Sid Jeffers, Humoresque (1946, Jean Negulesco)
Oscar Farrar, Romance on the High Seas (1948, Michael Curtiz)
Ezra Miller, The Barkleys of Broadway (1949, Charles Walters)
Adam Cook, An American in Paris (1951, Vincente Minnelli)
Lester Marton, The Band Wagon (1953, Minnelli)
For more on Levant, check out this article from The Guardian.
Friday, December 29, 2006
The Guardian on Oscar Levant
Hollywood's piano man
Misha Donat, The Guardian, 22 Dec 2006
From a week ago, but Levant's birthday was the 27th, so I'm not too far behind.
Also, he died in 1972, so not much about him has changed in the past week.
"It isn't what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts."
A line from the Joan Crawford melodrama Humoresque, spoken by Oscar Levant - who was born 100 years ago this month. He's playing the part of a pianist, but they are words that might have been intended for himself. Today the actor, musician and composer is chiefly remembered for his flamboyant public persona and his association with George Gershwin, yet at the peak of his career, in the early 1940s, his concert fee was higher than those commanded by Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein. Not because he was regarded as a finer pianist (he wasn't), but because his radio show, Information Please, had a regular audience of 12m and had made him a household name in the US.
Born in Pittsburgh on December 27 1906, Levant was the youngest son in an orthodox Jewish family. He received his first piano lessons from one of his brothers. On the day of his first lesson at high school, the Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski was due to give a local recital. The 12-year-old Levant greeted his new teacher by asking him if he wanted to hear what Paderewski was going to perform - and played the programme in its entirety.
Levant made his debut on Broadway at the age of 21 in Burlesque, adapted by Clifford Odets from a story by Fannie Hurst. He was cast as a pianist, and the play was filmed the following year as The Dance of Life. "I played an unsympathetic part: myself," he commented.
The best of his films was The Band Wagon, the Minnelli musical made in 1953, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. But by this time, Levant was clearly ill. He had always been a notorious hypochondriac and he had become addicted to prescription drugs. He was to make only one more film (also for Minnelli) - The Cobweb, in which he played another part that might have been modelled on himself: a patient in a psychiatric hospital.
His ill-tempered personality was legendary. Ernst Lubitsch's comedy That Uncertain Feeling features an obnoxious pianist who causes mayhem to the bourgeois marriage of Merle Oberon and Melvyn Douglas. The part was reputedly modelled on Levant. Kenneth Tynan summed him up: "Pearl is disease of oyster; Levant is disease of Hollywood."
As a wit, he could hold his own with such friends of his as Dorothy Parker, SJ Perelman and George S Kaufman and Tynan picked Levant as one of Hollywood's three quickest on the draw for one-liners. It was Levant who famously quipped, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."
Levant's talent for wisecracking ultimately put paid to his ambition to be taken seriously as a musician. The pieces he wrote during his period of study with Schoenberg - a piano concerto which he performed with the NBC Symphony, a string quartet and a nocturne - have sunk without trace. Of the 80-odd songs he composed, one at least - "Blame It On My Youth" - is still widely known, and was recorded by such artists as Chet Baker, Art Farmer, Keith Jarrett and Nat King Cole. Levant complained it brought back more memories than royalties.
His own recordings as a pianist include etudes, polonaises and mazurkas by Chopin, as well as music by Debussy and Liszt, and the Grieg and Tchaikovsky concertos (the latter with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy). But it is as a Gershwin pianist that his chief claim to fame lies. He played all the major works to the composer, so his interpretations have the stamp of authority; and his recordings of the "Rhapsody in Blue" (with Ormandy) and the "I Got Rhythm Variations" (with Morton Gould and his orchestra) have a rhythmic verve and spontaneity that have never been surpassed. So much did Levant fall under the spell of Gershwin, that a chapter devoted to him in his autobiography A Smattering of Ignorance is entitled - not without a tinge of irony - "My Life".
Oddly enough, in an article that notes Levant in Hollywood, the films he made with Vincente Minnelli and his association with George Gershwin, there is no mention of An American in Paris. Possibly because Ms. Donat finds the film as difficult to sit through as I do.
This article is the inspiration for this weeks 5 on Friday.
Misha Donat, The Guardian, 22 Dec 2006
From a week ago, but Levant's birthday was the 27th, so I'm not too far behind.
Also, he died in 1972, so not much about him has changed in the past week.
"It isn't what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts."
A line from the Joan Crawford melodrama Humoresque, spoken by Oscar Levant - who was born 100 years ago this month. He's playing the part of a pianist, but they are words that might have been intended for himself. Today the actor, musician and composer is chiefly remembered for his flamboyant public persona and his association with George Gershwin, yet at the peak of his career, in the early 1940s, his concert fee was higher than those commanded by Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein. Not because he was regarded as a finer pianist (he wasn't), but because his radio show, Information Please, had a regular audience of 12m and had made him a household name in the US.
Born in Pittsburgh on December 27 1906, Levant was the youngest son in an orthodox Jewish family. He received his first piano lessons from one of his brothers. On the day of his first lesson at high school, the Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski was due to give a local recital. The 12-year-old Levant greeted his new teacher by asking him if he wanted to hear what Paderewski was going to perform - and played the programme in its entirety.
Levant made his debut on Broadway at the age of 21 in Burlesque, adapted by Clifford Odets from a story by Fannie Hurst. He was cast as a pianist, and the play was filmed the following year as The Dance of Life. "I played an unsympathetic part: myself," he commented.
The best of his films was The Band Wagon, the Minnelli musical made in 1953, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. But by this time, Levant was clearly ill. He had always been a notorious hypochondriac and he had become addicted to prescription drugs. He was to make only one more film (also for Minnelli) - The Cobweb, in which he played another part that might have been modelled on himself: a patient in a psychiatric hospital.
His ill-tempered personality was legendary. Ernst Lubitsch's comedy That Uncertain Feeling features an obnoxious pianist who causes mayhem to the bourgeois marriage of Merle Oberon and Melvyn Douglas. The part was reputedly modelled on Levant. Kenneth Tynan summed him up: "Pearl is disease of oyster; Levant is disease of Hollywood."
As a wit, he could hold his own with such friends of his as Dorothy Parker, SJ Perelman and George S Kaufman and Tynan picked Levant as one of Hollywood's three quickest on the draw for one-liners. It was Levant who famously quipped, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."
Levant's talent for wisecracking ultimately put paid to his ambition to be taken seriously as a musician. The pieces he wrote during his period of study with Schoenberg - a piano concerto which he performed with the NBC Symphony, a string quartet and a nocturne - have sunk without trace. Of the 80-odd songs he composed, one at least - "Blame It On My Youth" - is still widely known, and was recorded by such artists as Chet Baker, Art Farmer, Keith Jarrett and Nat King Cole. Levant complained it brought back more memories than royalties.
His own recordings as a pianist include etudes, polonaises and mazurkas by Chopin, as well as music by Debussy and Liszt, and the Grieg and Tchaikovsky concertos (the latter with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy). But it is as a Gershwin pianist that his chief claim to fame lies. He played all the major works to the composer, so his interpretations have the stamp of authority; and his recordings of the "Rhapsody in Blue" (with Ormandy) and the "I Got Rhythm Variations" (with Morton Gould and his orchestra) have a rhythmic verve and spontaneity that have never been surpassed. So much did Levant fall under the spell of Gershwin, that a chapter devoted to him in his autobiography A Smattering of Ignorance is entitled - not without a tinge of irony - "My Life".
Oddly enough, in an article that notes Levant in Hollywood, the films he made with Vincente Minnelli and his association with George Gershwin, there is no mention of An American in Paris. Possibly because Ms. Donat finds the film as difficult to sit through as I do.
This article is the inspiration for this weeks 5 on Friday.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Red Dust! Notorious! Halloween! Fargo!
Librarian of Congress Adds Home Movie, Silent Films and Hollywood Classics to Film Preservation List
press release from the Library of Congress:
Many Americans typically spend the holiday season flocking to movie theaters nationwide. But even as they enjoy the latest releases, vast portions of the nation’s movie heritage are vanishing.
It is estimated that 50 percent of the films produced before 1950, and 80 to 90 percent made before 1920, have disappeared forever [ed. note: my emphasis]. The Library of Congress is working to stanch those losses by recognizing, and working with many organizations to preserve, films that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant.
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today added 25 motion pictures to the National Film Registry [below] to be preserved for all time, bringing the total number of films on the registry to 450.
In making the announcement, Billington said: "The annual selection of films to the National Film Registry involves far more than the simple naming of cherished and important films to a prestigious list. The Registry should not be seen as ‘The Kennedy Center Honors,’ ‘The Academy Awards,’ or even ‘America’s Most Beloved Films.’ Rather, it is an invaluable means to advance public awareness of the richness, creativity and variety of American film heritage, and to dramatize the need for its preservation. [take that, AFI!]
"The selection of a film recognizes its importance to American movie and cultural history, and to history in general. The Registry stands among the finest summations of more than a century of wondrous American cinema."
The 450 films in the National Film Registry represent a stunning range of American filmmaking, including Hollywood features, documentaries, avant-garde and amateur productions, films of ethnic and regional interest, and animated and short film subjects – all deserving recognition, preservation and access by future generations.
Despite preservation efforts by various organizations, "This key component of American cultural history is an endangered species," Billington said. He pointed out that more and more films are lost each year to nitrate deterioration, color fading and the recently discovered "vinegar syndrome," which threatens the acetate-based "safety film" stock on which the vast majority of motion pictures have been reproduced.
The 2006 selections span the years 1913 to 1996 and encompass films ranging from Hollywood classics to lesser-known but still vital works. Billington chose this year’s selections after evaluating nearly 1,000 titles nominated by the public and conducting intensive discussions with the Library’s Motion Picture division staff and the distinguished members and alternates of his advisory group, the National Film Preservation Board. The board also advises the Librarian on national film preservation policy.
Under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act , Congress established the National Film Registry in 1989 and reauthorized the program in April 2005 when it passed the "Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005" (Public Law 109-9).
"This legislation signifies great congressional interest in ensuring that motion pictures survive as an art form and a record of our times," Billington said.
Among other provisions, the law reauthorized the National Film Preservation Board, mandated that the Librarian and Board update the national film preservation plan (published in the mid-1990s) as needed, increased funding authorizations for the private sector National Film Preservation Foundation, and amended Section 108(h) of U.S. Copyright Law, which enables libraries and archives to make works in their final 20 years of copyright protection accessible for research and education if the works are not already commercially available.
For each title named to the registry, the Library of Congress works to ensure that the film is preserved for future generations, either through the Library’s massive motion picture preservation program or through collaborative ventures with other archives, motion picture studios and independent filmmakers.
The Library of Congress contains the largest collections of film and television works in the world, from the earliest surviving copyrighted motion picture to the latest feature releases. For more information, consult the National Film Preservation Board Web site at www.loc.gov/film.
The complete list will be found here.
2006 National Film Registry
Applause (1929, Rouben Mamoulian)
This early sound-era masterpiece was the first film of both stage/director Rouben Mamoulian and cabaret/star Helen Morgan. Many have compared Mamoulian’s debut to that of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane because of his flamboyant use of cinematic innovation to test technical boundaries. The tear-jerking plot boasts top performances from Morgan as the fading burlesque queen, Fuller Mellish Jr. as her slimy paramour and Joan Peters as her cultured daughter. However, the film is remembered today chiefly for Mamoulian’s audacious style. While most films of the era were static and stage-bound, Mamoulian’s camera reinvigorated the melodramatic plot by prowling relentlessly through sordid backstage life.
Applause is Mamoulian's second film on the NFR, joining Love Me Tonight (1932).
The Big Trail (1930, Raoul Walsh)
The story goes that director Raoul Walsh was seeking a male lead for his new Western and asked his friend John Ford. Ford recommended an unknown actor named John Wayne because he “liked the looks of this new kid with a funny walk, like he owned the world.” When Wayne professed inexperience, Walsh told him to just “sit good on a horse and point.” [Awesome.] The plot of a trek along the Oregon Trail is aided immensely by the majestic sweep provided by the experimental Grandeur wide-screen process used in filming. However, Wayne’s starring role in the movie did not lead to stardom. He languished in low-budget pictures until John Ford cast him in the 1939 classic Stagecoach [which was added to the NFR in 1995.]
The Big Trail joins Walsh's Regeneration (1915), The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and White Heat (1949) to become his fourth film on the NFR.
Blazing Saddles (1974, Mel Brooks)
This riotously funny, raunchy, no-holds-barred Western spoof by Mel Brooks is universally considered one of the 25 funniest American films of all time. The movie features a civil-rights theme (the man in the white hat turns out to be an African-American who has to defend a bigoted town), and its furiously paced gags and rapid-fire dialogue were scripted by Brooks, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor, Norman Steinberg and Alan Unger. Blazing Saddles was the highest grossing Western of all-time until 1990’s Dances with Wolves.
"...universally considered one of the 25 funniest American films of all time."? That's one of the vaguest statistics I've read in the past 25 days.
1975 Acadmeny Awards nominations
Best Supporting Actress: Madeline Kahn
Best Editing: John C. Howard & Danford B. Greene
Best Original Song: "Blazing Saddles," music by John Morris, lyrics by Mel Brooks
Blazing Saddles joins Brooks's The Producers (1968) and Young Frankenstein (1974) on the NFR.
The Curse of Quon Gwon (1916-17)
The Curse of Quon Gwon, long thought lost, is the earliest known Chinese-American feature and one of the first films directed by a woman, and was recently restored by the Academy Film Archive. The two surviving reels were brought to the attention of filmmaker Arthur Dong while researching his Hollywood Chinese documentary. Its timely rediscovery shows us that the history of ethnic filmmaking in the United States goes back much further than earlier thought.
I can't find the film on imdb (presumably because it's not there. And for some reason, the press release include the name of the director.
Daughter of Shanghai (1937, Robert Florey)
B-films during the studio era often resonate decades later because they explore issues and themes not found in higher-budget pictures. Robert Florey, widely acclaimed as the best director working in major studio B-films during this period, crafted an intriguing, taut thriller. Anna May Wong overcame Hollywood’s practice at the time of casting white actors to play Asian roles and became its first, and a leading, Asian-American movie star in the 1920s through the late 1930s. Daughter of Shanghai was more truly Wong’s personal vehicle than any of her other films. In the story she uncovers the smuggling of illegal aliens through San Francisco’s Chinatown, cooperating with costar Philip Ahn as the first Asian G-man of the American cinema.
Daughter of Shanghai joins Florey's The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra (1928) on the NFR.
Drums of Winter [Uksuum Cauyai] (1988, Sarah Elder & Leonard Kamerling)
Winner of numerous international awards, this beautiful documentary explores the rare dance language and culture of the Yup’ik Eskimo people in Emmonak, Alaska (part of the Yukon River delta on the Bering Sea). At the heart of their culture are complex potlatch gift-giving ceremonies featuring ceremonial story/dances serving as a bridge between the human and unseen spiritual worlds. At the center of the dance was the drum, serving as the cadence of the universe. The fabric of the community is woven together through giving: “Our spirits live by giving, things we give will return in larger amounts, because the wilderness has enough for all.”
Drums of Winter is not in the imbd. I even went against my better judgment and checked Wikipedia which, not surprisingly, also had nothing. So we'll just have to trust the Library of Congress on the "numerous international awards" assertion. Why would they lie?
Early Abstractions #1-5, 7, 10 (1939-56, Harry Smith)
Harry Smith made his mark in many fields. He was a painter, archivist and compiler of the landmark Anthology of American Music (which helped stimulate a folk and blues revival). Smith also was a groundbreaking avant-garde filmmaker whose revolutionary animation challenged traditional concepts of cinema. His films used batik, collage and optical printing to create a tumult of shapes and images that integrates chaos with control. Consisting of seven films made over a 17-year span, Early Abstractions is a lovely, ever-moving collage of abstraction, color and imagery.
While imdb includes Early Abstractions, it doesn't offer any new information and, in fact, dates it as 1987 -which appears to be the release years of a video compilation. More information can be found at Smith's page in the database.
Fargo (1996, Joel Coen)
This film is the Coen Brothers’ original black comic spin on murder, propelled by Frances McDormand’s “you-betcha,” pregnant police chief and William Macy’s clammy loser. The droll deadpan humor delights in frame after frame.
1997 Academy Awards
Best Actress: Frances McDormand
Best Original Screenplay: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
Additional 1997 Academy Awards nominations
Best Picture: Ethan Coen
Best Director: Joel Coen
Best Supporting Actor: William H. Macy
Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins
Best Editing: Roderick Jaynes (actually Joel and Ethan Coen, who edit all of their films under this name)
Surprisingly, this is the Coens' first appearance on the NFR.
Flesh and the Devil (1927, Clarence Brown)
One of the last silent film classics, Flesh and the Devil is the first on-screen pairing of silent superstars John Gilbert and Greta Garbo. It is a masterpiece of American romanticism from director Clarence Brown, who directed Garbo in seven classic films, and Garbo’s favorite cinematographer, William Daniels. In Flesh and the Devil, Garbo plays a seductress who sacrifices love for comfort and material luxury. The blistering chemistry between Garbo and Gilbert reflected their torrid, real-life affair at the time.
Much more than the story of a gold-digging seductress, Flesh and the Devil is rife with homosexual undertones. And a few overtones. I go into much more detail in my review of the film at movie-vault.com.
Flesh and the Devil joins Brown's The Last of the Mohicans (1920) and National Velvet (1944)to become his third film on the NFR. It is only the second Garbo vehicle to make it to the Registry, joining Ernst Lubitsch's 1939 masterpiece Ninotchka.
Groundhog Day (1993, Harold Ramis)
Groundhog Day is a clever comedy with a philosophical edge to boot. Bill Murray plays a smug, arrogant weatherman caught in a personal time-warp, who is continuously forced to relive the Punxsutawney, Penn., annual Groundhog Day event. At first Murray revels at being able to act dishonorably without consequences, but he soon grows weary of having to wake up every morning to Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” and facing the same day again and again. The deft, innovative script creatively keeps rearranging and building on each day’s events, while at the same time moving Murray’s character into self-growth, redemption and personal rebirth. Andie MacDowell’s character tells him, “I like to see a man of advancing years throwing caution to the wind. It’s inspiring in a way.” Murray’s character knowingly replies, “My years are not advancing as fast as you might think.”
Halloween (1978, John Carpenter)
John Carpenter’s first commercially successful film not only became his most famous work, but it also ushered in the dawn of the slasher film. However, Halloween, unlike many later films of that genre, creates a chilling tension with minimal blood and gore. The setting is Halloween night, and homicidal maniac Michael Myers has escaped from his mental institution and is hunting teenagers in his hometown of Haddonfield, Ill. Although the numerous imitations and elements of the genre are now considered a cliché, Carpenter’s style of point-of-view shots, tense editing and haunting piano score make Halloween uniquely artistic, frightening and a horror film keystone.
I find it refreshing that the LoC recognizes the greatness of Halloween, rather than lumping it into the "slasher" trash heap. Now if they'd only get around to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre...
In the Street (1948, Ed Howard)
This lyrical, slice-of-life documentary (by Helen Levitt, James Agee and Janice Loeb) about East Harlem is one of several outstanding children’s documentaries (The Quiet One and Louisiana Story, among others) produced immediately after World War II. The filmmakers captured the energy-filled streets as part theater, part battleground and part playground. In their everyday lives and actions, people project an image of human existence against the turmoil of the street.
According to imdb, Howard is credited as director, while Levitt, Agee and Loeb did the actual photography.
The Last Command (1928, Josef von Sternberg)
This film is Josef von Sternberg’s powerful drama of exiled Russian general Emil Jannings, who is reduced to the scraps of “extra” roles in Hollywood. Jannings’ Academy Award-winning performance towers over the screen, showcasing emotions ranging from his forceful leadership as a tsarist general, to incredulous dismay at the loss of his beloved country and his lover who helped him escape. Shaken out of his stupor when cast in a film about the Russian Revolution, Jannings summons his thunderous charisma in one final bid to somehow win the war for Mother Russia. The ending, considered one of cinema’s most memorable, remains heart-wrenching.
1929 Academy Award
Best Actor: Emil Jannings (also for his performance in The Way of All Flesh)
Additional 1929 Academy Award nomination
Best Writing, Original Story: Lajos Biro
This is von Sternberg's third film added to the NFR, joining Morocco (1930) and The Docks of New York (1928).
Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock)
Arguably Alfred Hitchcock’s best black-and-white American film, this is an excellent example of woman’s gothic. In the film, a woman (played by Ingrid Bergman) marries a Nazi killer (played by Claude Rains), although she is in love with an American spy (played by Cary Grant) who recruits her for the assignment. Rife with classic Hitchcock brilliance, featuring the crane shot and cross-cutting during the party sequence, “Notorious” is also a resonant cultural document of romantic alienation. Cary Grant is at his most attractive, letting his dark side fuel his bitter cynicism.
That's an awful description of a great film. There's nothing I (or anyone at the LoC, apparently) can say about Notorious that hasn't been said by much better writers.
1947 Academy Award nominations
Best Supporting Actor: Claude Rains
Best Original Screenplay: Ben Hecht
Notorious is Hitch's sixth film on the NFR, joining North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Vertigo (1958). He now ties with George Stevenson and William Wyler as the second most-represented director on the Registry. The all-time champ is John Ford with seven.
Red Dust (1932, Victor Felming)
This steamy pre-Production Code melodrama stars virile, tough guy Clark Gable as a Far East plantation owner who proves no match for Jean Harlow’s saucy incandescence. Her earthy, breathless dialogue (“You can check the wings and halo at the desk”) serves to turn up the heat. The movie’s well-remembered humor, star chemistry and atmosphere owe much to underrated director Victor Fleming, who managed to inspire a superior performance from Harlow, who was coping with the suicide of her husband [MGM executive Paul Bern] during the filming of Red Dust.
Red Dust is my personal favorite of Jean Harlow's performances. Harlow started out a so-so actress mostly notable for her the color of her hair. That all changed in 1932 with her double-whammy of Red Dust and Red-Headed Woman, proving that MGM's Platinum Blonde was also one hell of a comedic actress. Though they both appeared in 1931's The Secret Six, Red Dust was the first film to pair Gable and Harlow in starring roles. They went on to make four more together, including Hold Your Man (1933), China Seas (1935), Wife vs. Secretary (1936) and Saratoga (1937). Jean Harlow died of liver failure during the filming of Saratoga, at the age of 26.
Red Dust joins Fleming's 1939 classics Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz on the NFR.
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971-72, Jonas Mekas)
Jonas Mekas’ Reminiscences is an elegiac diary film of a trip that he took back to his birthplace of Semeniskiai, Lithuania. In addition to his own exceptional body of avant-garde films, Mekas also is a legendary member of that community through his work as spokesperson, archivist and theoretician of the avant-garde movement. Often called the godfather of American experimental cinema, his writings in Film Culture and The Village Voice helped spur public interest. His founding of the Film-Makers Cooperative and the Anthology Film Archives also made avant-garde films more accessible and aided their preservation.
Rocky (1976, John G. Avildsen)
This stirring tale of a million-to-one-shot underdog has become part of the American psyche. According to legend, Sylvester Stallone, then a down-on-his-luck actor, hurriedly wrote a brilliant script after watching the Muhammad Ali/Chuck Wepner fight. Stallone shopped the script to studios, who loved the plot but not Stallone’s take-it-or-leave-it demand that he star in the film. Eventually, Stallone and United Artists crafted a deal, and the film became a top-grossing cultural sensation in 1976. One of the truly iconic moments in American cinema is when Stallone runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the strains of Bill Conti’s pulsating score.
1977 Academy Awards
Best Picture: Irwin Winkler & Robert Chartoff
Best Director: John G. Avildsen
Best Film Editing: Richard Halsey & Scott Conrad
Additional 1977 Academy Award nominations
Best Actor: Sylvester Stallone
Best Actress: Talia Shire
Best Supporting Actor: Burt Young
Best Supporting Actor: Burgess Meredith
Best Original Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone
Best Original Song: "Gonna Fly Now," Bill Conti (music) and Carol Connors & Ayn Robbins (lyrics)
Best Sound: Harry W. Tetrick, William L. McCaughey, Lyle J. Burbridge, Bud Alper
sex, lies and videotape (1989, Steven Soderbergh)
Steven Soderbergh explores the messy personal relationships of four friends with an insinuatingly low-key style that creates a super-precise psychoanalysis of human impulses and inhibitions. This landmark film launched the independent film renaissance of the past two decades.
1990 Academy Award nomination
Best Original Screenplay: Steven Soderbergh
sex, lies and videotape is Soderbergh's first film on the NFR.
Siege (1940, Julien Bryan)
In his career, Julien Bryan, founder of the International Film Foundation, managed to amass a historical treasure trove of footage from foreign lands. On his way back from filming in Europe in 1939, Bryan became stranded in Warsaw during the German bombardment and blitzkrieg, where he managed to shoot and smuggle out an astonishing record of events in Warsaw. As the only neutral-country cameraman left in Warsaw when the Germans arrived, Bryan’s footage is a unique, horrifying record of the dreadful brutality of war. One such scene shows German planes strafing Polish women as they dug potatoes for their hungry families.
1941 Academy Award nomination
Best Short Subject, One-reel
St. Louis Blues (1929, Dudley Murphy)
A two-reeler made both for “race theater” distribution and RKO’s experiments with early recording of musical shorts in its theater chains, St. Louis Blues features the only film recording of Bessie Smith, “Queen of the Blues,” backed by an outstanding cast of African-American artists. According to film historian Donald Bogle, the film “was marred by its white director’s overstatement, but it was distinguished by Bessie Smith’s extraordinary ability to express black pain. … Haughty, husky, hungry, earthy, confident, and supremely committed to her music, Bessie Smith is magnificently larger than life here, a true dark diva, who lives up to her legend as one of America’s great original artists.”
St. Louis Blues joins Murphy's The Emporer Jones (1933) on the NFR.
The T.A.M.I. Show (1964, Steve Binder)
This legendary film (the initials stand for “Teen Age Music International”) is quite possibly the greatest rock and rhythm-and-blues concert on film. Considered wildly campy with screaming girls and Shindig!-style go-go dancers, the film captures all the live immediacy of an astonishing line-up in an era when films commonly matched records to lip-syncing. A who’s who of musicians creates magic onstage, from the Rolling Stones running onstage and plugging in their guitars to the show-stopping cape routine of James Brown.
Tess of the Storm Country (1914, Edwin S. Porter)
This is the feature film that made Canadian-born Mary Pickford, Hollywood’s first movie superstar, a national icon and an international celebrity. The film is often credited with launching what was known as the “cult of Mary Pickford” in the early 20th century and was essential in shaping the actress’s on-screen persona as a working-class heroine. The picture was so successful that it spawned a number of knockoffs and several remakes, including one by Pickford herself in 1922. The movie’s director, Edwin S. Porter, was a former cameraman of Thomas Edison who worked with Pickford on five of her earliest features. He is best known for two innovative silent shorts from 1903, The Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery.
Tess of the Storm Country joins The Great Train Robbery as the second film of Porter's on the NFR.
Think of Me First as a Person (1960-75)
Think of Me First as a Person is an astonishing discovery from the Center for Home Movies and its annual Home Movie Day, where once a year people in cities across the nation bring their home movies to screen. This loving portrait by a father of his son with Down syndrome represents the creativity and craftsmanship of the American amateur filmmaker.
A Time Out of War (1954, Denis Sanders)
Easily in the pantheon of best student films ever produced, A Time Out of War managed to beat the odds and win the Oscar for best short film. Two Union soldiers and one Confederate soldier declare a temporary truce in this sensitive, elegantly unhurried film that helped put student filmmaking on the cultural map.
1955 Academy Award
Best Short Subject, Two-reel: Denis Sanders & Terry Sanders
Traffic in Souls (1913, George Loane Tucker)
This sensational exposé of “white slavery” (forced prostitution) captivated the country upon its 1913 release and presaged the Hollywood narrative film. At six reels, its length was nearly unheard of at the time, save for a few biblical epics. Although arguably an exploitation film, the film’s riveting sociology is gripping in its portrayals of methods used to entrap working women and immigrants. Traffic in Souls holds up well today because of its verve and location shooting.
press release from the Library of Congress:
Many Americans typically spend the holiday season flocking to movie theaters nationwide. But even as they enjoy the latest releases, vast portions of the nation’s movie heritage are vanishing.
It is estimated that 50 percent of the films produced before 1950, and 80 to 90 percent made before 1920, have disappeared forever [ed. note: my emphasis]. The Library of Congress is working to stanch those losses by recognizing, and working with many organizations to preserve, films that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant.
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today added 25 motion pictures to the National Film Registry [below] to be preserved for all time, bringing the total number of films on the registry to 450.
In making the announcement, Billington said: "The annual selection of films to the National Film Registry involves far more than the simple naming of cherished and important films to a prestigious list. The Registry should not be seen as ‘The Kennedy Center Honors,’ ‘The Academy Awards,’ or even ‘America’s Most Beloved Films.’ Rather, it is an invaluable means to advance public awareness of the richness, creativity and variety of American film heritage, and to dramatize the need for its preservation. [take that, AFI!]
"The selection of a film recognizes its importance to American movie and cultural history, and to history in general. The Registry stands among the finest summations of more than a century of wondrous American cinema."
The 450 films in the National Film Registry represent a stunning range of American filmmaking, including Hollywood features, documentaries, avant-garde and amateur productions, films of ethnic and regional interest, and animated and short film subjects – all deserving recognition, preservation and access by future generations.
Despite preservation efforts by various organizations, "This key component of American cultural history is an endangered species," Billington said. He pointed out that more and more films are lost each year to nitrate deterioration, color fading and the recently discovered "vinegar syndrome," which threatens the acetate-based "safety film" stock on which the vast majority of motion pictures have been reproduced.
The 2006 selections span the years 1913 to 1996 and encompass films ranging from Hollywood classics to lesser-known but still vital works. Billington chose this year’s selections after evaluating nearly 1,000 titles nominated by the public and conducting intensive discussions with the Library’s Motion Picture division staff and the distinguished members and alternates of his advisory group, the National Film Preservation Board. The board also advises the Librarian on national film preservation policy.
Under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act , Congress established the National Film Registry in 1989 and reauthorized the program in April 2005 when it passed the "Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005" (Public Law 109-9).
"This legislation signifies great congressional interest in ensuring that motion pictures survive as an art form and a record of our times," Billington said.
Among other provisions, the law reauthorized the National Film Preservation Board, mandated that the Librarian and Board update the national film preservation plan (published in the mid-1990s) as needed, increased funding authorizations for the private sector National Film Preservation Foundation, and amended Section 108(h) of U.S. Copyright Law, which enables libraries and archives to make works in their final 20 years of copyright protection accessible for research and education if the works are not already commercially available.
For each title named to the registry, the Library of Congress works to ensure that the film is preserved for future generations, either through the Library’s massive motion picture preservation program or through collaborative ventures with other archives, motion picture studios and independent filmmakers.
The Library of Congress contains the largest collections of film and television works in the world, from the earliest surviving copyrighted motion picture to the latest feature releases. For more information, consult the National Film Preservation Board Web site at www.loc.gov/film.
The complete list will be found here.
2006 National Film Registry
Applause (1929, Rouben Mamoulian)
This early sound-era masterpiece was the first film of both stage/director Rouben Mamoulian and cabaret/star Helen Morgan. Many have compared Mamoulian’s debut to that of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane because of his flamboyant use of cinematic innovation to test technical boundaries. The tear-jerking plot boasts top performances from Morgan as the fading burlesque queen, Fuller Mellish Jr. as her slimy paramour and Joan Peters as her cultured daughter. However, the film is remembered today chiefly for Mamoulian’s audacious style. While most films of the era were static and stage-bound, Mamoulian’s camera reinvigorated the melodramatic plot by prowling relentlessly through sordid backstage life.
Applause is Mamoulian's second film on the NFR, joining Love Me Tonight (1932).
The Big Trail (1930, Raoul Walsh)
The story goes that director Raoul Walsh was seeking a male lead for his new Western and asked his friend John Ford. Ford recommended an unknown actor named John Wayne because he “liked the looks of this new kid with a funny walk, like he owned the world.” When Wayne professed inexperience, Walsh told him to just “sit good on a horse and point.” [Awesome.] The plot of a trek along the Oregon Trail is aided immensely by the majestic sweep provided by the experimental Grandeur wide-screen process used in filming. However, Wayne’s starring role in the movie did not lead to stardom. He languished in low-budget pictures until John Ford cast him in the 1939 classic Stagecoach [which was added to the NFR in 1995.]
The Big Trail joins Walsh's Regeneration (1915), The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and White Heat (1949) to become his fourth film on the NFR.
Blazing Saddles (1974, Mel Brooks)
This riotously funny, raunchy, no-holds-barred Western spoof by Mel Brooks is universally considered one of the 25 funniest American films of all time. The movie features a civil-rights theme (the man in the white hat turns out to be an African-American who has to defend a bigoted town), and its furiously paced gags and rapid-fire dialogue were scripted by Brooks, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor, Norman Steinberg and Alan Unger. Blazing Saddles was the highest grossing Western of all-time until 1990’s Dances with Wolves.
"...universally considered one of the 25 funniest American films of all time."? That's one of the vaguest statistics I've read in the past 25 days.
1975 Acadmeny Awards nominations
Best Supporting Actress: Madeline Kahn
Best Editing: John C. Howard & Danford B. Greene
Best Original Song: "Blazing Saddles," music by John Morris, lyrics by Mel Brooks
Blazing Saddles joins Brooks's The Producers (1968) and Young Frankenstein (1974) on the NFR.
The Curse of Quon Gwon (1916-17)
The Curse of Quon Gwon, long thought lost, is the earliest known Chinese-American feature and one of the first films directed by a woman, and was recently restored by the Academy Film Archive. The two surviving reels were brought to the attention of filmmaker Arthur Dong while researching his Hollywood Chinese documentary. Its timely rediscovery shows us that the history of ethnic filmmaking in the United States goes back much further than earlier thought.
I can't find the film on imdb (presumably because it's not there. And for some reason, the press release include the name of the director.
Daughter of Shanghai (1937, Robert Florey)
B-films during the studio era often resonate decades later because they explore issues and themes not found in higher-budget pictures. Robert Florey, widely acclaimed as the best director working in major studio B-films during this period, crafted an intriguing, taut thriller. Anna May Wong overcame Hollywood’s practice at the time of casting white actors to play Asian roles and became its first, and a leading, Asian-American movie star in the 1920s through the late 1930s. Daughter of Shanghai was more truly Wong’s personal vehicle than any of her other films. In the story she uncovers the smuggling of illegal aliens through San Francisco’s Chinatown, cooperating with costar Philip Ahn as the first Asian G-man of the American cinema.
Daughter of Shanghai joins Florey's The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra (1928) on the NFR.
Drums of Winter [Uksuum Cauyai] (1988, Sarah Elder & Leonard Kamerling)
Winner of numerous international awards, this beautiful documentary explores the rare dance language and culture of the Yup’ik Eskimo people in Emmonak, Alaska (part of the Yukon River delta on the Bering Sea). At the heart of their culture are complex potlatch gift-giving ceremonies featuring ceremonial story/dances serving as a bridge between the human and unseen spiritual worlds. At the center of the dance was the drum, serving as the cadence of the universe. The fabric of the community is woven together through giving: “Our spirits live by giving, things we give will return in larger amounts, because the wilderness has enough for all.”
Drums of Winter is not in the imbd. I even went against my better judgment and checked Wikipedia which, not surprisingly, also had nothing. So we'll just have to trust the Library of Congress on the "numerous international awards" assertion. Why would they lie?
Early Abstractions #1-5, 7, 10 (1939-56, Harry Smith)
Harry Smith made his mark in many fields. He was a painter, archivist and compiler of the landmark Anthology of American Music (which helped stimulate a folk and blues revival). Smith also was a groundbreaking avant-garde filmmaker whose revolutionary animation challenged traditional concepts of cinema. His films used batik, collage and optical printing to create a tumult of shapes and images that integrates chaos with control. Consisting of seven films made over a 17-year span, Early Abstractions is a lovely, ever-moving collage of abstraction, color and imagery.
While imdb includes Early Abstractions, it doesn't offer any new information and, in fact, dates it as 1987 -which appears to be the release years of a video compilation. More information can be found at Smith's page in the database.
Fargo (1996, Joel Coen)
This film is the Coen Brothers’ original black comic spin on murder, propelled by Frances McDormand’s “you-betcha,” pregnant police chief and William Macy’s clammy loser. The droll deadpan humor delights in frame after frame.
1997 Academy Awards
Best Actress: Frances McDormand
Best Original Screenplay: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
Additional 1997 Academy Awards nominations
Best Picture: Ethan Coen
Best Director: Joel Coen
Best Supporting Actor: William H. Macy
Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins
Best Editing: Roderick Jaynes (actually Joel and Ethan Coen, who edit all of their films under this name)
Surprisingly, this is the Coens' first appearance on the NFR.
Flesh and the Devil (1927, Clarence Brown)
One of the last silent film classics, Flesh and the Devil is the first on-screen pairing of silent superstars John Gilbert and Greta Garbo. It is a masterpiece of American romanticism from director Clarence Brown, who directed Garbo in seven classic films, and Garbo’s favorite cinematographer, William Daniels. In Flesh and the Devil, Garbo plays a seductress who sacrifices love for comfort and material luxury. The blistering chemistry between Garbo and Gilbert reflected their torrid, real-life affair at the time.
Much more than the story of a gold-digging seductress, Flesh and the Devil is rife with homosexual undertones. And a few overtones. I go into much more detail in my review of the film at movie-vault.com.
Flesh and the Devil joins Brown's The Last of the Mohicans (1920) and National Velvet (1944)to become his third film on the NFR. It is only the second Garbo vehicle to make it to the Registry, joining Ernst Lubitsch's 1939 masterpiece Ninotchka.
Groundhog Day (1993, Harold Ramis)
Groundhog Day is a clever comedy with a philosophical edge to boot. Bill Murray plays a smug, arrogant weatherman caught in a personal time-warp, who is continuously forced to relive the Punxsutawney, Penn., annual Groundhog Day event. At first Murray revels at being able to act dishonorably without consequences, but he soon grows weary of having to wake up every morning to Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” and facing the same day again and again. The deft, innovative script creatively keeps rearranging and building on each day’s events, while at the same time moving Murray’s character into self-growth, redemption and personal rebirth. Andie MacDowell’s character tells him, “I like to see a man of advancing years throwing caution to the wind. It’s inspiring in a way.” Murray’s character knowingly replies, “My years are not advancing as fast as you might think.”
Halloween (1978, John Carpenter)
John Carpenter’s first commercially successful film not only became his most famous work, but it also ushered in the dawn of the slasher film. However, Halloween, unlike many later films of that genre, creates a chilling tension with minimal blood and gore. The setting is Halloween night, and homicidal maniac Michael Myers has escaped from his mental institution and is hunting teenagers in his hometown of Haddonfield, Ill. Although the numerous imitations and elements of the genre are now considered a cliché, Carpenter’s style of point-of-view shots, tense editing and haunting piano score make Halloween uniquely artistic, frightening and a horror film keystone.
I find it refreshing that the LoC recognizes the greatness of Halloween, rather than lumping it into the "slasher" trash heap. Now if they'd only get around to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre...
In the Street (1948, Ed Howard)
This lyrical, slice-of-life documentary (by Helen Levitt, James Agee and Janice Loeb) about East Harlem is one of several outstanding children’s documentaries (The Quiet One and Louisiana Story, among others) produced immediately after World War II. The filmmakers captured the energy-filled streets as part theater, part battleground and part playground. In their everyday lives and actions, people project an image of human existence against the turmoil of the street.
According to imdb, Howard is credited as director, while Levitt, Agee and Loeb did the actual photography.
The Last Command (1928, Josef von Sternberg)
This film is Josef von Sternberg’s powerful drama of exiled Russian general Emil Jannings, who is reduced to the scraps of “extra” roles in Hollywood. Jannings’ Academy Award-winning performance towers over the screen, showcasing emotions ranging from his forceful leadership as a tsarist general, to incredulous dismay at the loss of his beloved country and his lover who helped him escape. Shaken out of his stupor when cast in a film about the Russian Revolution, Jannings summons his thunderous charisma in one final bid to somehow win the war for Mother Russia. The ending, considered one of cinema’s most memorable, remains heart-wrenching.
1929 Academy Award
Best Actor: Emil Jannings (also for his performance in The Way of All Flesh)
Additional 1929 Academy Award nomination
Best Writing, Original Story: Lajos Biro
This is von Sternberg's third film added to the NFR, joining Morocco (1930) and The Docks of New York (1928).
Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock)
Arguably Alfred Hitchcock’s best black-and-white American film, this is an excellent example of woman’s gothic. In the film, a woman (played by Ingrid Bergman) marries a Nazi killer (played by Claude Rains), although she is in love with an American spy (played by Cary Grant) who recruits her for the assignment. Rife with classic Hitchcock brilliance, featuring the crane shot and cross-cutting during the party sequence, “Notorious” is also a resonant cultural document of romantic alienation. Cary Grant is at his most attractive, letting his dark side fuel his bitter cynicism.
That's an awful description of a great film. There's nothing I (or anyone at the LoC, apparently) can say about Notorious that hasn't been said by much better writers.
1947 Academy Award nominations
Best Supporting Actor: Claude Rains
Best Original Screenplay: Ben Hecht
Notorious is Hitch's sixth film on the NFR, joining North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Vertigo (1958). He now ties with George Stevenson and William Wyler as the second most-represented director on the Registry. The all-time champ is John Ford with seven.
Red Dust (1932, Victor Felming)
This steamy pre-Production Code melodrama stars virile, tough guy Clark Gable as a Far East plantation owner who proves no match for Jean Harlow’s saucy incandescence. Her earthy, breathless dialogue (“You can check the wings and halo at the desk”) serves to turn up the heat. The movie’s well-remembered humor, star chemistry and atmosphere owe much to underrated director Victor Fleming, who managed to inspire a superior performance from Harlow, who was coping with the suicide of her husband [MGM executive Paul Bern] during the filming of Red Dust.
Red Dust is my personal favorite of Jean Harlow's performances. Harlow started out a so-so actress mostly notable for her the color of her hair. That all changed in 1932 with her double-whammy of Red Dust and Red-Headed Woman, proving that MGM's Platinum Blonde was also one hell of a comedic actress. Though they both appeared in 1931's The Secret Six, Red Dust was the first film to pair Gable and Harlow in starring roles. They went on to make four more together, including Hold Your Man (1933), China Seas (1935), Wife vs. Secretary (1936) and Saratoga (1937). Jean Harlow died of liver failure during the filming of Saratoga, at the age of 26.
Red Dust joins Fleming's 1939 classics Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz on the NFR.
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971-72, Jonas Mekas)
Jonas Mekas’ Reminiscences is an elegiac diary film of a trip that he took back to his birthplace of Semeniskiai, Lithuania. In addition to his own exceptional body of avant-garde films, Mekas also is a legendary member of that community through his work as spokesperson, archivist and theoretician of the avant-garde movement. Often called the godfather of American experimental cinema, his writings in Film Culture and The Village Voice helped spur public interest. His founding of the Film-Makers Cooperative and the Anthology Film Archives also made avant-garde films more accessible and aided their preservation.
Rocky (1976, John G. Avildsen)
This stirring tale of a million-to-one-shot underdog has become part of the American psyche. According to legend, Sylvester Stallone, then a down-on-his-luck actor, hurriedly wrote a brilliant script after watching the Muhammad Ali/Chuck Wepner fight. Stallone shopped the script to studios, who loved the plot but not Stallone’s take-it-or-leave-it demand that he star in the film. Eventually, Stallone and United Artists crafted a deal, and the film became a top-grossing cultural sensation in 1976. One of the truly iconic moments in American cinema is when Stallone runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the strains of Bill Conti’s pulsating score.
1977 Academy Awards
Best Picture: Irwin Winkler & Robert Chartoff
Best Director: John G. Avildsen
Best Film Editing: Richard Halsey & Scott Conrad
Additional 1977 Academy Award nominations
Best Actor: Sylvester Stallone
Best Actress: Talia Shire
Best Supporting Actor: Burt Young
Best Supporting Actor: Burgess Meredith
Best Original Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone
Best Original Song: "Gonna Fly Now," Bill Conti (music) and Carol Connors & Ayn Robbins (lyrics)
Best Sound: Harry W. Tetrick, William L. McCaughey, Lyle J. Burbridge, Bud Alper
sex, lies and videotape (1989, Steven Soderbergh)
Steven Soderbergh explores the messy personal relationships of four friends with an insinuatingly low-key style that creates a super-precise psychoanalysis of human impulses and inhibitions. This landmark film launched the independent film renaissance of the past two decades.
1990 Academy Award nomination
Best Original Screenplay: Steven Soderbergh
sex, lies and videotape is Soderbergh's first film on the NFR.
Siege (1940, Julien Bryan)
In his career, Julien Bryan, founder of the International Film Foundation, managed to amass a historical treasure trove of footage from foreign lands. On his way back from filming in Europe in 1939, Bryan became stranded in Warsaw during the German bombardment and blitzkrieg, where he managed to shoot and smuggle out an astonishing record of events in Warsaw. As the only neutral-country cameraman left in Warsaw when the Germans arrived, Bryan’s footage is a unique, horrifying record of the dreadful brutality of war. One such scene shows German planes strafing Polish women as they dug potatoes for their hungry families.
1941 Academy Award nomination
Best Short Subject, One-reel
St. Louis Blues (1929, Dudley Murphy)
A two-reeler made both for “race theater” distribution and RKO’s experiments with early recording of musical shorts in its theater chains, St. Louis Blues features the only film recording of Bessie Smith, “Queen of the Blues,” backed by an outstanding cast of African-American artists. According to film historian Donald Bogle, the film “was marred by its white director’s overstatement, but it was distinguished by Bessie Smith’s extraordinary ability to express black pain. … Haughty, husky, hungry, earthy, confident, and supremely committed to her music, Bessie Smith is magnificently larger than life here, a true dark diva, who lives up to her legend as one of America’s great original artists.”
St. Louis Blues joins Murphy's The Emporer Jones (1933) on the NFR.
The T.A.M.I. Show (1964, Steve Binder)
This legendary film (the initials stand for “Teen Age Music International”) is quite possibly the greatest rock and rhythm-and-blues concert on film. Considered wildly campy with screaming girls and Shindig!-style go-go dancers, the film captures all the live immediacy of an astonishing line-up in an era when films commonly matched records to lip-syncing. A who’s who of musicians creates magic onstage, from the Rolling Stones running onstage and plugging in their guitars to the show-stopping cape routine of James Brown.
Tess of the Storm Country (1914, Edwin S. Porter)
This is the feature film that made Canadian-born Mary Pickford, Hollywood’s first movie superstar, a national icon and an international celebrity. The film is often credited with launching what was known as the “cult of Mary Pickford” in the early 20th century and was essential in shaping the actress’s on-screen persona as a working-class heroine. The picture was so successful that it spawned a number of knockoffs and several remakes, including one by Pickford herself in 1922. The movie’s director, Edwin S. Porter, was a former cameraman of Thomas Edison who worked with Pickford on five of her earliest features. He is best known for two innovative silent shorts from 1903, The Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery.
Tess of the Storm Country joins The Great Train Robbery as the second film of Porter's on the NFR.
Think of Me First as a Person (1960-75)
Think of Me First as a Person is an astonishing discovery from the Center for Home Movies and its annual Home Movie Day, where once a year people in cities across the nation bring their home movies to screen. This loving portrait by a father of his son with Down syndrome represents the creativity and craftsmanship of the American amateur filmmaker.
A Time Out of War (1954, Denis Sanders)
Easily in the pantheon of best student films ever produced, A Time Out of War managed to beat the odds and win the Oscar for best short film. Two Union soldiers and one Confederate soldier declare a temporary truce in this sensitive, elegantly unhurried film that helped put student filmmaking on the cultural map.
1955 Academy Award
Best Short Subject, Two-reel: Denis Sanders & Terry Sanders
Traffic in Souls (1913, George Loane Tucker)
This sensational exposé of “white slavery” (forced prostitution) captivated the country upon its 1913 release and presaged the Hollywood narrative film. At six reels, its length was nearly unheard of at the time, save for a few biblical epics. Although arguably an exploitation film, the film’s riveting sociology is gripping in its portrayals of methods used to entrap working women and immigrants. Traffic in Souls holds up well today because of its verve and location shooting.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
NY Times Highlights Top DVD Releases of 06
From Film to Fetish Object: The Year’s Noteworthy DVDs
By Dave Kehr, New York Times, December 22, 2006
DVDs are more than just plastic discs with movies tucked inside. At their best these strangely compelling objects owe their appeal to a combination of elements, one that might begin with a movie but also includes the extras: the packaging, the program notes, the menu design, the commentary tracks and a wide range of supplementary material, from deleted scenes to entire features. Aligning all these things requires genuine editorial skill, just as getting what are often dirty, faded old prints to look and sound sharp and new again demands technical ability and artistic judgment.
This list of 10 of the year’s most notable DVD releases is meant to acknowledge the contributions of those frequently anonymous technicians and designers who create these alluring fetish objects. And rather than simply concede the field to the Criterion Collection and Warner Home Video, which lead the pack in presentation and breadth of selection, I’ve tried to spread things out among several companies striving for quality, whether linked to major studios or operated as labors of love out of basements and back rooms.
Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales
Criterion, the company that introduced directors’ commentaries and supplementary material in the laser disc days, is still on top of the heap. And its commitment to the highest standards in visual quality, value-added supplements and scholarship has seldom been more strongly represented than by this boxed-set edition of six Rohmer films (including My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee), which represent one of the signal accomplishments of the French New Wave. Mr. Rohmer supervised the transfers, which for the two early, short films came from delicate 16-millimeter prints, and also subjected himself to a rare on-camera interview with his former star and producer Barbet Schroeder. A handful of other early Rohmer shorts, including the sublime Nadja in Paris, are included, as well as On Pascal, a sample of the educational films he has never stopped making for French television. One stand-alone book includes the short stories, written by Mr. Rohmer long before they were filmed, on which the Moral Tales are based; another contains essays by prominent critics, including Kent Jones and Molly Haskell. Fully the equivalent of an academic edition of a great author’s work, with some of the cinema’s most deliciously erotic moments thrown in at no extra charge. (Criterion, $99.95)
John Wayne-John Ford Film Collection
Bringing together eight of the Ford-Wayne films now controlled by Time Warner, this terrific set chronicles one of the most fruitful (and neurotically complex) director-star collaborations in American film. The big dog is The Searchers, the 1956 film publicly dismissed by Ford (along with many critics of the time) as “a potboiler” that has slowly assumed its rightful position as a legitimate contender for the Great American Movie, plunging straight to the heart of this country’s great crimes and great glories. The collection includes a remastered edition of Stagecoach, the 1939 film that put Wayne on the road to stardom after a decade in B westerns, and the DVD premieres of The Long Voyage Home (1940), The Wings of Eagles (1957) [ed. note: The Wings of Eagles is strictly for completionists.] and Fort Apache (1948), the first of Ford’s “cavalry trilogy.” They Were Expendable, the hauntingly muffled, melancholic film that Ford made upon his return from his service in World War II, speaks directly to Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima. (Warner Home Video, $79.98)
Phantom
The independent company Flicker Alley has released only three DVDs in its short history, each a dedicated attempt to recapture the exquisite visual quality of silent cinema. Most scholars would place Phantom (1922) — the tale of a failed poet (Alfred Abel) obsessed with an unattainable upper-class woman — among the secondary works of its director, F. W. Murnau. But the Flicker Alley presentation, based on one of the restorations of German silents sponsored by the F. W. Murnau Foundation, which have produced mixed results, is glowingly alive. Care was taken with the transfer to video, and the tasteful color tinting for once does not overpower the tonal range of the black-and-white images. (Flicker Alley, $29.98)
Wanda
It isn’t only silent films that need restoration and revival. Barbara Loden’s groundbreaking independent film was made in 1970 and has been practically impossible to see since; the fledgling distributor Parlour Pictures has discovered an excellent copy of this astonishing work, about a desperate woman from the Appalachian coal country (played by Ms. Loden) who gets mixed up with a petty crook, and reassembled it into the great achievement in American neorealism that it is. Ms. Loden, who died of cancer in 1980, never made another film, but Wanda secures her place in the pantheon. (Parlour Pictures, $24.95)
The Valerio Zurlini Box Set: The Early Masterpieces
What you always hope for when you slip in an unknown DVD: the revelation of a major filmmaker you have barely heard of. This two-feature set from the Italian-American company NoShame includes two films by Mr. Zurlini: Violent Summer, a 1959 romantic drama set during the last days of Fascism that clearly influenced Bernardo Bertolucci’s Conformist, and the glowing Girl With a Suitcase (1961), starring the 23-year-old Claudia Cardinale as a failed cabaret singer who reluctantly falls under the protection of a naïve teenage boy from a wealthy family. Copious supplementary material helps to fill in the portrait of this unjustly neglected filmmaker, as does NoShame’s other Zurlini release this year, the mournful epic Desert of the Tartars (1976). (NoShame, $29.95)
Lubitsch in Berlin
More restorations from Germany’s busy Murnau Foundation, these early features — The Oyster Princess and I Don’t Want to Be a Man (on one disc); Sumurun, Anna Boleyn and The Wildcat — by the future master of sophisticated Hollywood comedy aren’t in quite as good shape as Phantom, but they offer an engaging portrait of an artist in development. From the broadly satirical comedy of The Oyster Princess (1919) to the historical drama of Anna Boleyn (1920), Ernst Lubitsch can be seen refining his technique, continually paring away the inessential and overstated, moving toward the mastery of saying so much with so little that characterized his American-made masterpieces like Trouble in Paradise (1932). (Kino, $29.95 each disc)
Reds
Paramount, which sold most of its rich pre-1948 holdings to MCA-Universal for a mess of pottage, probably has the thinnest library of the major studios. And to judge from the no-frills DVDs it has been publishing, the video division does not have the backing of Paramount’s corporate masters. But when the opportunity is there, as it was with Warren Beatty’s tragicomic epic of early-20th-century radical politics, Paramount can rise to the occasion: this two-disc set offers magnificent color and an immaculate image, as well as a lengthy documentary directed by Laurent Bouzereau that covers every aspect of the film’s making. With this release, 1900, The Conformist and the first volume of the Martin and Lewis Collection, Paramount is finally stepping up to the plate; here’s hoping it finds marketers who are better able to exploit its still quite compelling library of 1950s and ’60s features, which includes long unseen work by Frank Tashlin, Leo McCarey, Anthony Mann, Phil Karlson, Blake Edwards, Otto Preminger and Howard Hawks. (Paramount Home Video, $19.99)
Mr. Moto Collection, Vol. 1
Fox’s DVD division has been moving up fast in the last few years, and when it puts time and money into a project, as it did with this set and its excellent film noir series, the results are spectacular. Unlike the movies in Fox’s Charlie Chan series, now in its second volume of superlative restorations, the Moto films were not whodunits but highly entertaining exotic espionage adventures set in a studio-constructed Far East, starring Peter Lorre (with fake eyelids and buck teeth) as a mysterious international operator of Japanese origin. Fox is to be thanked for sinking so much effort into the digital restoration of these relatively obscure films, and helping to revive both the reputation of the series and the standing of its principal director, Norman Foster. (Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, $59.98)
Cary Grant: Screen Legend Collection
With the Universal library and the pre-1948 Paramount titles, Universal Home Video has the richest unexploited film holdings in Hollywood. It’s unfortunate that so many of its movies have fallen out of distribution, making it impossible to see (legally at least) masterpieces like Frank Borzage’s Little Man, What Now? and Josef von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy, not to mention hundreds of unknown, unexplored films, among which would certainly be items of tremendous interest if anyone were allowed to get to them. But with the “Franchise Collection” series, Universal has found an economic and appealing way of slipping some of its lesser-known titles into the marketplace. I pick the Cary Grant collection just as an example. Here, spread out on three discs, are five films, including the pre-Code comedies Thirty Day Princess and Kiss and Make-Up (both 1934), that could never have stood on their own, but together make a must-have set. [Ed. note: The collection also includes Wings in the Dark (1935), Big Brown Eyes (1936) and Wedding Present (1936)] Other collections have been devoted to John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Bing Crosby, Mae West, Carole Lombard and Cecil B. DeMille (as well as, inexplicably, Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule); I hope they keep it up forever. (Universal Home Video, $29.98)
Beyond the Rocks
Sheer altruism on the part of Milestone Film and Video, one of the finest of the boutique labels. This 1922 feature, the only film to pair two of the silent era’s biggest stars, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, was rescued from the chaos of a private collection by the Nederlands Filmmuseum and restored to excellent shape. Milestone has packaged it with a second feature, the 1919 Delicious Little Devil; an 85-minute radio interview with Swanson recorded in 1955; documentaries about the rediscovery and reconstruction of Beyond the Rocks; and your choice of two orchestral scores. It hardly matters that the movie, the work of the perennially dull Sam Wood, isn’t a masterpiece. [This is true. I saw the Beyond the Rocks at the Music Box Theatre here in Chicago earlier this year and I...um...fell asleep.] This significant bit of film history, which otherwise would have been seen by only a handful of academics and museumgoers [yo!], is now available to an audience far beyond the big cities where such things usually play. And that may be the ultimate justification for the DVD format: spreading the word beyond the happy few who live within subway [or walking] distance of the Museum of Modern Art [or the Music Box]. (Milestone, $29.95)
Milestone isn’t the only boutique doing terrific work: I wish I had room to more thoroughly plug Koch Lorber Films, Synapse Films, Mondo Macabro, IFC Films, First Run Features, Facets, VCI Entertainment, Other Cinema, Palm Pictures, Alpha Video and Dark Sky Films, among others. How will video on demand alter this idyllic landscape? By the end of next year we should start to know.
By Dave Kehr, New York Times, December 22, 2006
DVDs are more than just plastic discs with movies tucked inside. At their best these strangely compelling objects owe their appeal to a combination of elements, one that might begin with a movie but also includes the extras: the packaging, the program notes, the menu design, the commentary tracks and a wide range of supplementary material, from deleted scenes to entire features. Aligning all these things requires genuine editorial skill, just as getting what are often dirty, faded old prints to look and sound sharp and new again demands technical ability and artistic judgment.
This list of 10 of the year’s most notable DVD releases is meant to acknowledge the contributions of those frequently anonymous technicians and designers who create these alluring fetish objects. And rather than simply concede the field to the Criterion Collection and Warner Home Video, which lead the pack in presentation and breadth of selection, I’ve tried to spread things out among several companies striving for quality, whether linked to major studios or operated as labors of love out of basements and back rooms.
Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales
Criterion, the company that introduced directors’ commentaries and supplementary material in the laser disc days, is still on top of the heap. And its commitment to the highest standards in visual quality, value-added supplements and scholarship has seldom been more strongly represented than by this boxed-set edition of six Rohmer films (including My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee), which represent one of the signal accomplishments of the French New Wave. Mr. Rohmer supervised the transfers, which for the two early, short films came from delicate 16-millimeter prints, and also subjected himself to a rare on-camera interview with his former star and producer Barbet Schroeder. A handful of other early Rohmer shorts, including the sublime Nadja in Paris, are included, as well as On Pascal, a sample of the educational films he has never stopped making for French television. One stand-alone book includes the short stories, written by Mr. Rohmer long before they were filmed, on which the Moral Tales are based; another contains essays by prominent critics, including Kent Jones and Molly Haskell. Fully the equivalent of an academic edition of a great author’s work, with some of the cinema’s most deliciously erotic moments thrown in at no extra charge. (Criterion, $99.95)
John Wayne-John Ford Film Collection
Bringing together eight of the Ford-Wayne films now controlled by Time Warner, this terrific set chronicles one of the most fruitful (and neurotically complex) director-star collaborations in American film. The big dog is The Searchers, the 1956 film publicly dismissed by Ford (along with many critics of the time) as “a potboiler” that has slowly assumed its rightful position as a legitimate contender for the Great American Movie, plunging straight to the heart of this country’s great crimes and great glories. The collection includes a remastered edition of Stagecoach, the 1939 film that put Wayne on the road to stardom after a decade in B westerns, and the DVD premieres of The Long Voyage Home (1940), The Wings of Eagles (1957) [ed. note: The Wings of Eagles is strictly for completionists.] and Fort Apache (1948), the first of Ford’s “cavalry trilogy.” They Were Expendable, the hauntingly muffled, melancholic film that Ford made upon his return from his service in World War II, speaks directly to Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima. (Warner Home Video, $79.98)
Phantom
The independent company Flicker Alley has released only three DVDs in its short history, each a dedicated attempt to recapture the exquisite visual quality of silent cinema. Most scholars would place Phantom (1922) — the tale of a failed poet (Alfred Abel) obsessed with an unattainable upper-class woman — among the secondary works of its director, F. W. Murnau. But the Flicker Alley presentation, based on one of the restorations of German silents sponsored by the F. W. Murnau Foundation, which have produced mixed results, is glowingly alive. Care was taken with the transfer to video, and the tasteful color tinting for once does not overpower the tonal range of the black-and-white images. (Flicker Alley, $29.98)
Wanda
It isn’t only silent films that need restoration and revival. Barbara Loden’s groundbreaking independent film was made in 1970 and has been practically impossible to see since; the fledgling distributor Parlour Pictures has discovered an excellent copy of this astonishing work, about a desperate woman from the Appalachian coal country (played by Ms. Loden) who gets mixed up with a petty crook, and reassembled it into the great achievement in American neorealism that it is. Ms. Loden, who died of cancer in 1980, never made another film, but Wanda secures her place in the pantheon. (Parlour Pictures, $24.95)
The Valerio Zurlini Box Set: The Early Masterpieces
What you always hope for when you slip in an unknown DVD: the revelation of a major filmmaker you have barely heard of. This two-feature set from the Italian-American company NoShame includes two films by Mr. Zurlini: Violent Summer, a 1959 romantic drama set during the last days of Fascism that clearly influenced Bernardo Bertolucci’s Conformist, and the glowing Girl With a Suitcase (1961), starring the 23-year-old Claudia Cardinale as a failed cabaret singer who reluctantly falls under the protection of a naïve teenage boy from a wealthy family. Copious supplementary material helps to fill in the portrait of this unjustly neglected filmmaker, as does NoShame’s other Zurlini release this year, the mournful epic Desert of the Tartars (1976). (NoShame, $29.95)
Lubitsch in Berlin
More restorations from Germany’s busy Murnau Foundation, these early features — The Oyster Princess and I Don’t Want to Be a Man (on one disc); Sumurun, Anna Boleyn and The Wildcat — by the future master of sophisticated Hollywood comedy aren’t in quite as good shape as Phantom, but they offer an engaging portrait of an artist in development. From the broadly satirical comedy of The Oyster Princess (1919) to the historical drama of Anna Boleyn (1920), Ernst Lubitsch can be seen refining his technique, continually paring away the inessential and overstated, moving toward the mastery of saying so much with so little that characterized his American-made masterpieces like Trouble in Paradise (1932). (Kino, $29.95 each disc)
Reds
Paramount, which sold most of its rich pre-1948 holdings to MCA-Universal for a mess of pottage, probably has the thinnest library of the major studios. And to judge from the no-frills DVDs it has been publishing, the video division does not have the backing of Paramount’s corporate masters. But when the opportunity is there, as it was with Warren Beatty’s tragicomic epic of early-20th-century radical politics, Paramount can rise to the occasion: this two-disc set offers magnificent color and an immaculate image, as well as a lengthy documentary directed by Laurent Bouzereau that covers every aspect of the film’s making. With this release, 1900, The Conformist and the first volume of the Martin and Lewis Collection, Paramount is finally stepping up to the plate; here’s hoping it finds marketers who are better able to exploit its still quite compelling library of 1950s and ’60s features, which includes long unseen work by Frank Tashlin, Leo McCarey, Anthony Mann, Phil Karlson, Blake Edwards, Otto Preminger and Howard Hawks. (Paramount Home Video, $19.99)
Mr. Moto Collection, Vol. 1
Fox’s DVD division has been moving up fast in the last few years, and when it puts time and money into a project, as it did with this set and its excellent film noir series, the results are spectacular. Unlike the movies in Fox’s Charlie Chan series, now in its second volume of superlative restorations, the Moto films were not whodunits but highly entertaining exotic espionage adventures set in a studio-constructed Far East, starring Peter Lorre (with fake eyelids and buck teeth) as a mysterious international operator of Japanese origin. Fox is to be thanked for sinking so much effort into the digital restoration of these relatively obscure films, and helping to revive both the reputation of the series and the standing of its principal director, Norman Foster. (Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, $59.98)
Cary Grant: Screen Legend Collection
With the Universal library and the pre-1948 Paramount titles, Universal Home Video has the richest unexploited film holdings in Hollywood. It’s unfortunate that so many of its movies have fallen out of distribution, making it impossible to see (legally at least) masterpieces like Frank Borzage’s Little Man, What Now? and Josef von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy, not to mention hundreds of unknown, unexplored films, among which would certainly be items of tremendous interest if anyone were allowed to get to them. But with the “Franchise Collection” series, Universal has found an economic and appealing way of slipping some of its lesser-known titles into the marketplace. I pick the Cary Grant collection just as an example. Here, spread out on three discs, are five films, including the pre-Code comedies Thirty Day Princess and Kiss and Make-Up (both 1934), that could never have stood on their own, but together make a must-have set. [Ed. note: The collection also includes Wings in the Dark (1935), Big Brown Eyes (1936) and Wedding Present (1936)] Other collections have been devoted to John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Bing Crosby, Mae West, Carole Lombard and Cecil B. DeMille (as well as, inexplicably, Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule); I hope they keep it up forever. (Universal Home Video, $29.98)
Beyond the Rocks
Sheer altruism on the part of Milestone Film and Video, one of the finest of the boutique labels. This 1922 feature, the only film to pair two of the silent era’s biggest stars, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, was rescued from the chaos of a private collection by the Nederlands Filmmuseum and restored to excellent shape. Milestone has packaged it with a second feature, the 1919 Delicious Little Devil; an 85-minute radio interview with Swanson recorded in 1955; documentaries about the rediscovery and reconstruction of Beyond the Rocks; and your choice of two orchestral scores. It hardly matters that the movie, the work of the perennially dull Sam Wood, isn’t a masterpiece. [This is true. I saw the Beyond the Rocks at the Music Box Theatre here in Chicago earlier this year and I...um...fell asleep.] This significant bit of film history, which otherwise would have been seen by only a handful of academics and museumgoers [yo!], is now available to an audience far beyond the big cities where such things usually play. And that may be the ultimate justification for the DVD format: spreading the word beyond the happy few who live within subway [or walking] distance of the Museum of Modern Art [or the Music Box]. (Milestone, $29.95)
Milestone isn’t the only boutique doing terrific work: I wish I had room to more thoroughly plug Koch Lorber Films, Synapse Films, Mondo Macabro, IFC Films, First Run Features, Facets, VCI Entertainment, Other Cinema, Palm Pictures, Alpha Video and Dark Sky Films, among others. How will video on demand alter this idyllic landscape? By the end of next year we should start to know.
Friday, December 22, 2006
5 Non-Thin Man William Powell/Myrna Loy Pairings
(I already covered Christmas movies here.)
1. Double Wedding (1937, Richard Thorpe)
2. The Great Ziegfeld (1936, Robert Z. Leonard)
3. I Love You Again (1940, W.S. Van Dyke)
4. Libeled Lady (1936, Jack Conway)
5. Love Crazy (1941, Jack Conway)
1. Double Wedding (1937, Richard Thorpe)
2. The Great Ziegfeld (1936, Robert Z. Leonard)
3. I Love You Again (1940, W.S. Van Dyke)
4. Libeled Lady (1936, Jack Conway)
5. Love Crazy (1941, Jack Conway)
Monday, December 18, 2006
More Reasons to Hate the American Film Institute (AFI's Ten Best of 2006)
The American Film Institute aggravates me more and more every year. Their "100 Years..." series names the same movies over and over and the accompanying TV specials are painful to watch. I used to give them (both the AFI and their lists/specials) credit for encouraging people to talk about movies. Their first list, in 1998, which trumpeted the 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time, provided me with a handy starter course in US film history. I know that the only reason I ever saw Yankee Doodle Dandy was because of its inclusion on the list and I loved it. But the more I learned about film, the more I came to disrespect the AFI
For starters, they rank the movies. How is Citizen Kane (#1 on the 100 Greatest Films list, which I'll continue to use for consistency's sake) better or worse than Annie Hall (#31)? How can the two even be compared? Why not just list the films alphabetically? And what the hell is GoodFellas doing at #94? And where is Sullivan's Travels? And what is Forest Gump (#71) doing on the list? And how exactly are The Third Man (#57) and A Clockwork Orange (#46) American films?
I could go on and on. In fact, I just deleted three more paragraphs on the subject. But that list is eight years old. I finally had it with the AFI earlier this year with the release of their 25 Greatest Movie Musicals. No Gigi. No Love Me Tonight. But Grease is there. At #20. Just ahead of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
The AFI has just announced its 2006 "Movies of the Year: Offical Selections."
Babel (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles)
The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel)
Dreamgirls (Bill Condon)
Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck)
Happy Feet (George Miller)
Inside Man (Spike Lee)
Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood)
Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris)
United 93 (Paul Greengrass)
I can't comment on the quality of the individual films, as I've only seen four of them. What I can say is that both The Departed (Martin Scorsese) and Little Children (Todd Field) are better than Babel, which is ambitious, but ultimately unfulfilling.
For starters, they rank the movies. How is Citizen Kane (#1 on the 100 Greatest Films list, which I'll continue to use for consistency's sake) better or worse than Annie Hall (#31)? How can the two even be compared? Why not just list the films alphabetically? And what the hell is GoodFellas doing at #94? And where is Sullivan's Travels? And what is Forest Gump (#71) doing on the list? And how exactly are The Third Man (#57) and A Clockwork Orange (#46) American films?
I could go on and on. In fact, I just deleted three more paragraphs on the subject. But that list is eight years old. I finally had it with the AFI earlier this year with the release of their 25 Greatest Movie Musicals. No Gigi. No Love Me Tonight. But Grease is there. At #20. Just ahead of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
The AFI has just announced its 2006 "Movies of the Year: Offical Selections."
Babel (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles)
The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel)
Dreamgirls (Bill Condon)
Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck)
Happy Feet (George Miller)
Inside Man (Spike Lee)
Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood)
Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris)
United 93 (Paul Greengrass)
I can't comment on the quality of the individual films, as I've only seen four of them. What I can say is that both The Departed (Martin Scorsese) and Little Children (Todd Field) are better than Babel, which is ambitious, but ultimately unfulfilling.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
On DVD This Tuesday...
A comprehensive list of all December 19th releases can be found at DVD Aficionado.
Of interest to me (and maybe to you too):
The suprise hit of the summer, the superb Little Miss Sunshine (2006, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris)
And where would we be without Alpha? This week, out favorite monitor of the public domain brings us, among others:
Atomic Age Classics, Vol. 4: Venereal Disease and You
Atomic Age Classics, Vol. 5: "C" Is for Communist
Amos 'n' Andy in Check and Double-Check (1930, Melville W. Brown)
Delightfully Dangerous (1945, Arthur Lubin) with Jane Powell and Ralph Bellamy
Harlem Double Feature: Lena Horne's film debut, The Duke is Tops (1938, William L. Nolte) has been paired with the Cab Calloway vehicle Hi-De-Ho (1947, Josh Binney).
Harlem Double Feature: The Clarence Brooks films Murder in Harlem (1935, Oscar Michaux) and Harlem Rides the Range (1938, Richard C. Kahn) make up the other set.
And, most importantly, the 1932 version of Vanity Fair (Chester M. Franklin), starring Myrna Loy as Becky Sharp.
Of interest to me (and maybe to you too):
Warner Home Video releases the first six winners of its DVD Decision 2006, all of which are new to DVD (otherwise it would have been a rather silly contest):
Best Foot Forward (1943, Edward Buzzell): Amazon.com Exclusive
The Illustrated Man (1969, Jack Smight)
Operation Crossbow (1965, Michael Anderson)
Presenting Lily Mars (1943, Norman Taurog)
There Was A Crooked Man... (1970, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
Up Periscope (1959, Gordon Douglas)
The suprise hit of the summer, the superb Little Miss Sunshine (2006, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris)
And where would we be without Alpha? This week, out favorite monitor of the public domain brings us, among others:
Atomic Age Classics, Vol. 4: Venereal Disease and You
Atomic Age Classics, Vol. 5: "C" Is for Communist
Amos 'n' Andy in Check and Double-Check (1930, Melville W. Brown)
Delightfully Dangerous (1945, Arthur Lubin) with Jane Powell and Ralph Bellamy
Harlem Double Feature: Lena Horne's film debut, The Duke is Tops (1938, William L. Nolte) has been paired with the Cab Calloway vehicle Hi-De-Ho (1947, Josh Binney).
Harlem Double Feature: The Clarence Brooks films Murder in Harlem (1935, Oscar Michaux) and Harlem Rides the Range (1938, Richard C. Kahn) make up the other set.
And, most importantly, the 1932 version of Vanity Fair (Chester M. Franklin), starring Myrna Loy as Becky Sharp.
Friday, December 15, 2006
5 Musicals with Afro-American Casts
There was a time when Dreamgirls would have been marketed as an "All-Black" musical. Here are five that were:*
Cabin in the Sky (1943, Vincente Minnelli)
Carmen Jones (1954, Otto Preminger)
Hallelujah! (1929, King Vidor)
Porgy and Bess (1959, Otto Preminger)*
Stormy Weather (1943, Andrew L. Stone)
- Andrew L. Stone is the least well-known of the four directors above, but don't worry. He's just as white as the rest of them.
- For further reading, I highly recommend Donald Bogle's excellent Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood.
*To be fair, Porgy and Bess would technically be an "All-Black Plus Claude Akins Musical," but you try fitting that into a marketing campaign.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
The New York Times on the Films of W. Somerset Maugham
Another Encore for the Most Adaptable of Authors
By CHARLES McGRATH, New York Times, 10 December 2006
IF there were a prize for authors who have had the most movies made from their work, W. Somerset Maugham would be at or near the top of the list. Jeffrey Meyers, Maugham’s latest biographer, counts 48 Maugham-based movies, and that’s not including made-for-TV movies or foreign films, in which case the total runs into the hundreds. Maugham himself felt, grudgingly, that he was better known for the film adaptations of his books than for the books themselves.
Maugham, who died in 1965 at 91, enjoyed an extremely long and productive career, which is a good start for a writer hoping to rack up his kind of stats; nor does it hurt that so many of his works were filmed more than once. Of Human Bondage was famously made into a movie three times: in 1934, with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, in the role that jump-started her career; in 1946, with Paul Henreid and Eleanor Parker; and in 1964, with Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak. So was "Rain", probably Maugham’s most famous short story: in 1928, with Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barrymore [titled Sadie Thompson]; in 1932 [Rain], with Joan Crawford and Walter Huston; and in 1953, with Rita Hayworth and José Ferrer [Miss Sadie Thompson. "Rain" was also filmed as Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. in 1946 with an all Afro-American cast led by Francine Everett and Don Wilson. How Mr. McGrath managed to not include the best-titled of all Maugham movies in his article is a mystery to me.]
The latest Maugham film, a new version of The Painted Veil starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber, which opens Dec. 20, will make that less-known property a three-timer as well, pushing it ahead of The Razor’s Edge and The Letter, which were each filmed only twice.
The original Letter (1940), starring Bette Davis again, is probably the best of the Maugham movies. [There are actually three versions. The other two were released in 1929 and as The Unfaithful in 1947 .] On the other hand, the 1946 Razor’s Edge, with Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power, was pretty bad, despite an Oscar-winning performance by Anne Baxter as the alcoholic Sophie; the 1984 remake, starring Bill Murray in what amounts to a vanity production, was worse.
And the track record for The Painted Veil isn’t much better. The second version, renamed The Seventh Sin, came out in 1957 [with Eleanor Parker again] and sank like a stone. The 1934 original, a hard-to-find vehicle for Greta Garbo, is worth looking at for Garbo alone, but it’s a period piece and takes some very strange liberties with the book.
Both Mr. Norton and Ron Nyswaner, who wrote the screenplay for the new Painted Veil (and who is best known as the screenwriter of Philadelphia), say they have never seen it. Ms. Watts and John Curran, the director of the new film, each dug up copies, however, and took them along while shooting in China.
“I’d call Naomi and tease her, ‘Are you watching it?’ ” Mr. Curran recalled recently. “And she’d say, ‘No, I watched for 10 minutes, and that’s all I could stand.’ ” He added: “It’s almost unwatchable — a dull melodrama, all shot in the studio. I remember thinking, ‘Well, whatever happens, at least I’ll make a better movie than that.’ ”
Lytton Strachey once said that The Painted Veil, which was published in 1925, was a novel at the top of the second rank, and the same could be said of most of Maugham’s work. He was a novelist of a sort that scarcely exists anymore: a serious, highbrow (or highish-brow) entertainer, who for a while was even more successful as a playwright than as a novelist.
Maugham was a knowing and worldly storyteller, interested above all in characters and in the texture of their social relations, but he was also fascinated by people who were ready to renounce the world in quest of something better. The formula made him a great popular success, earning him a fortune, but he also managed his career so adroitly that he became a kind of brand name for classiness and elegance. His persona so appealed to Hollywood that for a series of anthology films in the late 1940s and early 1950s he appeared as himself, sleek and lizardlike, smoking a cigarette and introducing his own work.
The Painted Veil is the story of Walter and Kitty Fane: a priggish British bacteriologist and the frivolous social climber who marries him in a moment of desperation, convinced that she’s let all the better catches slip through her grasp. The couple move to Hong Kong, where Walter has been posted, and Kitty, bored and sexually frustrated, quickly embarks on an affair with a sweet-talker from the British consulate (Mr. Schreiber). When Walter finds out, he forces her into a kind of mutual suicide pact: she has to accompany him to a remote Chinese village where a cholera epidemic is raging, and there, though this is hardly what her husband intended, she discovers a larger purpose to her life.
The Painted Veil is shorter and more constricted than the novels for which Maugham is better known, Of Human Bondage especially, but it contains most of the ingredients that have made him such an attractive source for moviemakers. It’s smart and different, and like so much of Maugham it’s set in an exotic locale. (He is more famous now for writing about the South Seas, but he was one of the first modern British writers to visit China.) It’s sexy, opening with a scene of Kitty and her lover in bed together and giving them another near the end, when Kitty, at least partly redeemed and no longer in love with him, nevertheless yields to lust and loneliness. And the novel introduces a cast of strong and striking characters, very clearly delineated: not just Walter and Kitty but a number of supporting figures, including the caddish lover; Kitty’s appalling, ambitious mother; and Waddington (played in the new film by Toby Jones), a kindly Brit who has gone part native and has a secret Chinese mistress.
Maugham’s characters are so vivid, so starkly drawn, that they sometimes seem one-dimensional — not that this has troubled most moviemakers. This is the case in “Rain,” for example, with Sadie Thompson, the blowzy, big-hearted prostitute, and Alfred Davidson, the uptight missionary; in both the story and its several movie versions theirs is a clash of the single-minded. And it’s equally true of Walter Fane. Perhaps because Maugham modeled him on his older brother, Frederic, a cold, fussy and self-righteous lawyer who couldn’t accept Maugham’s homosexuality, Walter, in the novel at least, is so rigid and unforgiving as to seem almost inhuman.
The book stumbles in other ways as well, failing to develop, for example, the symbolic potential of the epidemic, which it barely describes, just as, for that matter, it mostly fails to describe China itself. The story takes place largely inside the heads of Walter and Kitty.
All these limitations the new Painted Veil turns into opportunities, so that it’s one of those rare Hollywood movies that are actually better than the books that inspired them. “I like to think that we didn’t change the book so much as liberate it,” Mr. Norton said in a recent interview. “We just imagined it on a slightly bigger scale, and made external some of what is internal in the novel.”
Maugham is not quite the hot property that he used to be, however, and making the movie took forever. Mr. Norton, who is also a producer of The Painted Veil, got involved with the project back in 1999. The script had already been bouncing around for a few years, shepherded by the producer Sara Colleton, and was going through almost countless drafts. There were strictly faithful versions, versions that took more liberties with the novel, and at one point even a feminist version.
It was Mr. Norton’s idea to enhance the role of Walter and include an element of redemption and forgiveness: in the movie, unlike the book, he eventually makes his peace with Kitty, and the two even fall in love. He almost literally melts before the viewer’s eye. It’s a development so natural, so in keeping with the book’s larger theme of transcendence, that you wonder why Maugham didn’t think of it.
“The novel is almost unremittingly bleak,” Mr. Norton said. “And the reason is I think Maugham had a pretty dim view of the potential of British colonials to change. But I went on the assumption that if you were willing to allow Walter and Kitty to grow, then you had the potential for a love story that was both tragic and meaningful.”
Mr. Nyswaner, the screenwriter, said: “Edward had this running joke with me that we couldn’t make a movie in which he was off screen all the time. But he was right — you have to have scenes for the male star. This was a case where the conventions of moviemaking actually helped.”
It was also Mr. Norton’s idea to enlist Ms. Watts for the part of Kitty, and that proved to be the deal clincher, but only after Ms. Watts became a bankable star with Mulholland Drive and 21 Grams. She in turn suggested Mr. Curran, who had directed her in We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004), a tale of two disintegrating marriages. That movie convinced both Mr. Norton and Ms. Watts that he had a knack for depicting dysfunctional relationships, but as it turned out, he made an even greater contribution to The Painted Veil: he helped make China not just a backdrop to the story, as it is in the novel, but an essential part of it.
That the movie would be shot on location in China was a given almost from the beginning. “There is no way I was going to make a movie that looked as if it had been shot in Canada,” Mr. Curran said. And instead of just building a set for the cholera-stricken village, he held out for an actual piece of unspoiled Chinese landscape, not an easy thing to find these days.
“Even the Chinese crew members were amazed at the place we found, Huang Yao,” he said. “It was like going back in time.”
It was also Mr. Curran’s idea to set the film specifically amid the events of 1925, when the Chinese nationalist movement was just beginning, and Mr. Norton, who had studied Chinese history at Yale, immediately agreed. He even worked with Mr. Curran and Mr. Nyswaner to add some scenes based on Jonathan D. Spence’s book “To Change China,” about the often bumbling efforts of Western advisers there.
“We’ve let Walter become the proxy for the arrogance of Western rationalism,” Mr. Norton explained, talking about how Walter is baffled when the Chinese are insufficiently grateful for his help in fighting cholera. “Walter means well, but he’s the folly of empire, and that adds a whole new dimension to what happens in the story. It’s a metaphor for the way empires get crushed.”
Mr. Nyswaner said: “Edward became passionate about the film. I tend toward despair, but he has this dogged optimism, and it’s because of him that the film ever got made.”
A movie about a love affair and a cholera epidemic in China in the ’20s is “such an unlikely project when you think of it,” Mr. Curran said. “Imagine the hurdles of getting it set up — all those executives looking with glazed eyes.”
Mr. Nyswaner said: “At least 50 percent of our energy went into negotiations and fending off powerful people’s suggestions. We even got notes from the Chinese government. In the script there was a prose description of some mountains as gloomy, and the government said, ‘We don’t have gloomy mountains here — our mountains are joyous.’ ”
Random Trivia: Bette Davis gave one of her best performances in Of Human Bondage, and was favored to win 1934's Academy Award - which went to Claudette Colbert, who gave a very different superb performance in It Happened One Night. In her autobiography, The Lonely Life, Davis maintains that her Oscar the following year for Dangerous was an apology from the Academy for their previous indiscretion.
By CHARLES McGRATH, New York Times, 10 December 2006
IF there were a prize for authors who have had the most movies made from their work, W. Somerset Maugham would be at or near the top of the list. Jeffrey Meyers, Maugham’s latest biographer, counts 48 Maugham-based movies, and that’s not including made-for-TV movies or foreign films, in which case the total runs into the hundreds. Maugham himself felt, grudgingly, that he was better known for the film adaptations of his books than for the books themselves.
Maugham, who died in 1965 at 91, enjoyed an extremely long and productive career, which is a good start for a writer hoping to rack up his kind of stats; nor does it hurt that so many of his works were filmed more than once. Of Human Bondage was famously made into a movie three times: in 1934, with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, in the role that jump-started her career; in 1946, with Paul Henreid and Eleanor Parker; and in 1964, with Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak. So was "Rain", probably Maugham’s most famous short story: in 1928, with Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barrymore [titled Sadie Thompson]; in 1932 [Rain], with Joan Crawford and Walter Huston; and in 1953, with Rita Hayworth and José Ferrer [Miss Sadie Thompson. "Rain" was also filmed as Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. in 1946 with an all Afro-American cast led by Francine Everett and Don Wilson. How Mr. McGrath managed to not include the best-titled of all Maugham movies in his article is a mystery to me.]
The latest Maugham film, a new version of The Painted Veil starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber, which opens Dec. 20, will make that less-known property a three-timer as well, pushing it ahead of The Razor’s Edge and The Letter, which were each filmed only twice.
The original Letter (1940), starring Bette Davis again, is probably the best of the Maugham movies. [There are actually three versions. The other two were released in 1929 and as The Unfaithful in 1947 .] On the other hand, the 1946 Razor’s Edge, with Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power, was pretty bad, despite an Oscar-winning performance by Anne Baxter as the alcoholic Sophie; the 1984 remake, starring Bill Murray in what amounts to a vanity production, was worse.
And the track record for The Painted Veil isn’t much better. The second version, renamed The Seventh Sin, came out in 1957 [with Eleanor Parker again] and sank like a stone. The 1934 original, a hard-to-find vehicle for Greta Garbo, is worth looking at for Garbo alone, but it’s a period piece and takes some very strange liberties with the book.
Both Mr. Norton and Ron Nyswaner, who wrote the screenplay for the new Painted Veil (and who is best known as the screenwriter of Philadelphia), say they have never seen it. Ms. Watts and John Curran, the director of the new film, each dug up copies, however, and took them along while shooting in China.
“I’d call Naomi and tease her, ‘Are you watching it?’ ” Mr. Curran recalled recently. “And she’d say, ‘No, I watched for 10 minutes, and that’s all I could stand.’ ” He added: “It’s almost unwatchable — a dull melodrama, all shot in the studio. I remember thinking, ‘Well, whatever happens, at least I’ll make a better movie than that.’ ”
Lytton Strachey once said that The Painted Veil, which was published in 1925, was a novel at the top of the second rank, and the same could be said of most of Maugham’s work. He was a novelist of a sort that scarcely exists anymore: a serious, highbrow (or highish-brow) entertainer, who for a while was even more successful as a playwright than as a novelist.
Maugham was a knowing and worldly storyteller, interested above all in characters and in the texture of their social relations, but he was also fascinated by people who were ready to renounce the world in quest of something better. The formula made him a great popular success, earning him a fortune, but he also managed his career so adroitly that he became a kind of brand name for classiness and elegance. His persona so appealed to Hollywood that for a series of anthology films in the late 1940s and early 1950s he appeared as himself, sleek and lizardlike, smoking a cigarette and introducing his own work.
The Painted Veil is the story of Walter and Kitty Fane: a priggish British bacteriologist and the frivolous social climber who marries him in a moment of desperation, convinced that she’s let all the better catches slip through her grasp. The couple move to Hong Kong, where Walter has been posted, and Kitty, bored and sexually frustrated, quickly embarks on an affair with a sweet-talker from the British consulate (Mr. Schreiber). When Walter finds out, he forces her into a kind of mutual suicide pact: she has to accompany him to a remote Chinese village where a cholera epidemic is raging, and there, though this is hardly what her husband intended, she discovers a larger purpose to her life.
The Painted Veil is shorter and more constricted than the novels for which Maugham is better known, Of Human Bondage especially, but it contains most of the ingredients that have made him such an attractive source for moviemakers. It’s smart and different, and like so much of Maugham it’s set in an exotic locale. (He is more famous now for writing about the South Seas, but he was one of the first modern British writers to visit China.) It’s sexy, opening with a scene of Kitty and her lover in bed together and giving them another near the end, when Kitty, at least partly redeemed and no longer in love with him, nevertheless yields to lust and loneliness. And the novel introduces a cast of strong and striking characters, very clearly delineated: not just Walter and Kitty but a number of supporting figures, including the caddish lover; Kitty’s appalling, ambitious mother; and Waddington (played in the new film by Toby Jones), a kindly Brit who has gone part native and has a secret Chinese mistress.
Maugham’s characters are so vivid, so starkly drawn, that they sometimes seem one-dimensional — not that this has troubled most moviemakers. This is the case in “Rain,” for example, with Sadie Thompson, the blowzy, big-hearted prostitute, and Alfred Davidson, the uptight missionary; in both the story and its several movie versions theirs is a clash of the single-minded. And it’s equally true of Walter Fane. Perhaps because Maugham modeled him on his older brother, Frederic, a cold, fussy and self-righteous lawyer who couldn’t accept Maugham’s homosexuality, Walter, in the novel at least, is so rigid and unforgiving as to seem almost inhuman.
The book stumbles in other ways as well, failing to develop, for example, the symbolic potential of the epidemic, which it barely describes, just as, for that matter, it mostly fails to describe China itself. The story takes place largely inside the heads of Walter and Kitty.
All these limitations the new Painted Veil turns into opportunities, so that it’s one of those rare Hollywood movies that are actually better than the books that inspired them. “I like to think that we didn’t change the book so much as liberate it,” Mr. Norton said in a recent interview. “We just imagined it on a slightly bigger scale, and made external some of what is internal in the novel.”
Maugham is not quite the hot property that he used to be, however, and making the movie took forever. Mr. Norton, who is also a producer of The Painted Veil, got involved with the project back in 1999. The script had already been bouncing around for a few years, shepherded by the producer Sara Colleton, and was going through almost countless drafts. There were strictly faithful versions, versions that took more liberties with the novel, and at one point even a feminist version.
It was Mr. Norton’s idea to enhance the role of Walter and include an element of redemption and forgiveness: in the movie, unlike the book, he eventually makes his peace with Kitty, and the two even fall in love. He almost literally melts before the viewer’s eye. It’s a development so natural, so in keeping with the book’s larger theme of transcendence, that you wonder why Maugham didn’t think of it.
“The novel is almost unremittingly bleak,” Mr. Norton said. “And the reason is I think Maugham had a pretty dim view of the potential of British colonials to change. But I went on the assumption that if you were willing to allow Walter and Kitty to grow, then you had the potential for a love story that was both tragic and meaningful.”
Mr. Nyswaner, the screenwriter, said: “Edward had this running joke with me that we couldn’t make a movie in which he was off screen all the time. But he was right — you have to have scenes for the male star. This was a case where the conventions of moviemaking actually helped.”
It was also Mr. Norton’s idea to enlist Ms. Watts for the part of Kitty, and that proved to be the deal clincher, but only after Ms. Watts became a bankable star with Mulholland Drive and 21 Grams. She in turn suggested Mr. Curran, who had directed her in We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004), a tale of two disintegrating marriages. That movie convinced both Mr. Norton and Ms. Watts that he had a knack for depicting dysfunctional relationships, but as it turned out, he made an even greater contribution to The Painted Veil: he helped make China not just a backdrop to the story, as it is in the novel, but an essential part of it.
That the movie would be shot on location in China was a given almost from the beginning. “There is no way I was going to make a movie that looked as if it had been shot in Canada,” Mr. Curran said. And instead of just building a set for the cholera-stricken village, he held out for an actual piece of unspoiled Chinese landscape, not an easy thing to find these days.
“Even the Chinese crew members were amazed at the place we found, Huang Yao,” he said. “It was like going back in time.”
It was also Mr. Curran’s idea to set the film specifically amid the events of 1925, when the Chinese nationalist movement was just beginning, and Mr. Norton, who had studied Chinese history at Yale, immediately agreed. He even worked with Mr. Curran and Mr. Nyswaner to add some scenes based on Jonathan D. Spence’s book “To Change China,” about the often bumbling efforts of Western advisers there.
“We’ve let Walter become the proxy for the arrogance of Western rationalism,” Mr. Norton explained, talking about how Walter is baffled when the Chinese are insufficiently grateful for his help in fighting cholera. “Walter means well, but he’s the folly of empire, and that adds a whole new dimension to what happens in the story. It’s a metaphor for the way empires get crushed.”
Mr. Nyswaner said: “Edward became passionate about the film. I tend toward despair, but he has this dogged optimism, and it’s because of him that the film ever got made.”
A movie about a love affair and a cholera epidemic in China in the ’20s is “such an unlikely project when you think of it,” Mr. Curran said. “Imagine the hurdles of getting it set up — all those executives looking with glazed eyes.”
Mr. Nyswaner said: “At least 50 percent of our energy went into negotiations and fending off powerful people’s suggestions. We even got notes from the Chinese government. In the script there was a prose description of some mountains as gloomy, and the government said, ‘We don’t have gloomy mountains here — our mountains are joyous.’ ”
Random Trivia: Bette Davis gave one of her best performances in Of Human Bondage, and was favored to win 1934's Academy Award - which went to Claudette Colbert, who gave a very different superb performance in It Happened One Night. In her autobiography, The Lonely Life, Davis maintains that her Oscar the following year for Dangerous was an apology from the Academy for their previous indiscretion.
Friday, December 8, 2006
Gay rights and wrongs: Hollywood's biggest taboo
When two of America's brightest young actors decided to come out of the closet, there were hopes the industry was learning to practise what it preached. But homosexuality is still the love that dare not speak its name, reports Andrew Gumbel
The Independent, December 2006
The article focuses on two television actors, but Hollywood is Hollywood and that means movies.
Sometimes, Hollywood's secrets spill out in the most surprising ways. Back in October, two of the stars on Grey's Anatomy, the hottest hospital drama show on American television, had a raging fight on the set. Isaiah Washington was ready to go with a scene, but some of the other actors were not. He and Patrick Dempsey - who both play surgical residents in a fictional Seattle hospital - started exchanging words and, at one point, Washington grabbed Dempsey by the throat. According to news reports at the time, Washington said: "I'm not your little faggot like that guy." Or something along those lines.
The remark was probably meant as no more than a rebuke of Dempsey and his apparent expectation that Washington would work to his schedule. But the gossip-mongers on the internet quickly started asking who exactly the "faggot" might be. Was one of the cast-members on the show gay? So far, so trivial. But then something thoroughly unexpected happened. T R Knight, a 33-year-old actor on the show who plays an emphatically heterosexual doctor called George O'Malley, issued a statement to People magazine. "I guess there have been a few questions about my sexuality, and I'd like to quiet any unnecessary rumours that may be out there," he said. "While I prefer to keep my personal life private, I hope the fact that I'm gay isn't the most interesting part of me."
In the showbusiness world, this was little short of a bombshell. Hollywood may fancy itself as a politically progressive sort of place, where gay people are not only accepted but are employed in large numbers. But the unwritten rule - unchanged in many decades - is that no actor ever admits he is homosexual. Especially not a young, good-looking actor whose character, like Dr O'Malley, conducts on-screen relationships with one attractive woman after another.
Knight's coming out was not the only surprise of the season. A few weeks later, some of the blunter showbiz bloggers on the internet started murmuring about another prominent television actor, Neil Patrick Harris, who is currently starring in a sitcom called How I Met Your Mother, playing an inveterate womaniser. Harris made his name as a teenage performer in the Steven Bochco - David E Kelley comedy Doogie Howser[, M.D.] about a child prodigy. He then played a drugged out version of himself in the cult 2004 film Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.
In late October, a website called Canada.com posted a nasty little item that started: "Nepotism is alive and well in Hollywood." It went on to suggest that Harris had secured a guest role on How I Met Your Mother for a fellow actor it referred to as his boyfriend. Harris's publicist issued a statement stating that Harris "is not of that persuasion", only to be deluged in more negative publicity on the web from bloggers accusing both Harris and his publicist of hypocrisy and bad faith.
Once again, People magazine got the scoop, another personal statement from an actor acknowledging his homosexuality. "The public eye has always been kind to me, and until recently, I have been able to live a pretty normal life," Harris said. "Now, it seems there is speculation and interest in my private life .
"So, rather than ignore those who choose to publish their opinions without actually talking to me, I am happy to dispel any rumours or misconceptions and am quite proud to say that I am a very content gay man living my life to the fullest and fortunate to be working with wonderful people in the business I love."
Actors who have spent any time working in the Hollywood system are little short of stunned. It's not that there is anything faintly unusual or shocking about the existence of gay actors. Going public, though, is something that simply is not done. "It's a death sentence for your career," said Eve Gordon, a (heterosexual) film and television actress. "All my friends who are gay keep it secret. They don't even know where to draw the line socially... It's like being a Communist in the McCarthy era. It's a gigantic terror. So coming out is an incredibly brave thing to do."
That hard truth is itself a taboo topic of conversation in 2006. This, after all, was touted as the year of the gay movie, thanks to the success and multiple awards showered on Brokeback Mountain, Capote and other titles featuring openly gay characters. Hollywood likes to think of itself as a bastion of sexual tolerance. When gay men started going down with Aids in disproportionate numbers in the 1980s, Hollywood rushed to raise money and awareness of the disease and destigmatise its causes.
The Aids crisis, in turn, made it easier to break one taboo - the depiction of gay characters on screen. Tom Hanks' Oscar-winning turn as a lawyer dying of Aids in Philadelphia (1992) was undoubtedly the big turning point in that battle. Before that, playing gay was regarded as a possible threat to an actor's future career. After that, it became positively desirable.
According to Donna Deitch, who wrote and directed the groundbreaking lesbian romance Desert Hearts in the mid-1980s, playing a gay character is now seen on a par with playing an autistic character, or a schizophrenic, or someone with horrible physical deformities. "That's where the acclaim is," she said. "Actors want to play disadvantaged people, whatever the disadvantage is...
"In 1986, when I made Desert Hearts, you couldn't get any actors of any consequence or familiarity to even consider the role of a gay character. It wasn't going to happen. Now, if you are offering a gay part, and it's a good part, people are going to jump at it. That's what's changed."
The appeal extends to female gay parts as well as male ones: Hillary Swank won an Oscar for her role as a transgendered teenager in Boys Don't Cry, and Charlize Theron came close to winning another one when she played the real-life lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003). The one difference, Deitch pointed out sardonically, is that lesbian characters almost invariably end up either in a bisexual love triangle or dead. "Only in Desert Hearts," she said, "do they live happily ever after."
But playing gay and admitting to being gay are two completely different things. When it comes to the latter, Hollywood still adheres to the mentality that American audiences look to their on-screen idols as outlets for their own romantic fantasies and thus need to think of them as strictly heterosexual. The mentality is not necessarily wrong - homophobia is certainly widespread in the American heartland, as evidenced by the slew of recent state ballot initiatives condemning gay marriage. But it does suggest a certain failure of the imagination. Actors, after all, are professionals who make audiences believe they are something they are not. If a straight actor like Hanks can play a gay character convincingly, why shouldn't a gay actor play straight? The fear goes deeper still: the actors seeking out gay parts, like Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, or Greg Kinnear in the Jack Nicholson comedy As Good As It Gets, are all unambiguously heterosexual in real life. They are, as one veteran Hollywood actor put it, "beyond suspicion". You don't have to believe the scurrilously persistent - and vehemently denied -rumours concerning Tom Cruise's sexuality to understand that Hollywood's most visible leading man is never ever going to play a gay character on screen.
There are exceptions to the rule. A openly gay character actor such as Sir Ian McKellen can work unhindered partly because of the prestige that comes of being a British stage veteran and partly because he is not expected to play heterosexual romantic leads. An actress like Ellen DeGeneres - who famously came out on her own sitcom in the late 1990s - doesn't suffer unduly because she is a comedian first and an actor only second, and because, once again, she doesn't play parts that call for her to knock the sexual socks off her male audience members.
An openly gay actor called Jack Plotnick plays a womaniser on the Lifetime Network's series Lovespring [International]. Another, called Sam Harris, plays a notably effeminate but heterosexual character on CBS's The Class. But these are not big shows, and not the sorts of actors to wind up being discussed in Entertainment Weekly and the gossip rags.
For the most part, fear continues to rule. One actor, who did not want to be named, told a story of asking after a colleague's boyfriend while the two of them were in make-up. The colleague froze, visibly upset, and later explained that he didn't want his homosexuality mentioned even in front of the hair and make-up people, for fear that word might reach the show runners and producers and jeopardise his prospects of future work.
The actor heaped considerable blame on Hollywood's power elite, many of whom, are themselves openly gay but still continue to perpetuate an atmosphere of intolerance and oppression. "A lot of people are working against gays to shore up their own closet door," the actor said. "They say it's all about the market - if people won't buy it, there's nothing they can do about it." This is, of course, the way it's been since the golden age of the Hollywood studio system. Gay actors like Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson were expected to make public displays of interest in the opposite sex. A recent biography of James Stewart revealed that, at the start of his career, Louis B Mayer was so worried about the implications of Stewart's lack of association with women that he obliged him to visit a private brothel he kept near the MGM lot. Part of the job of powerful gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who took money from the studios, was to keep the public behaviour of gay actors in check and make sure their secret stayed safe from the American public.
Something is clearly changing now, if only because of the rise of the internet and an unmistakable paparazzi culture that feasts on the personal foibles of celebrities big and small. T R Knight and Neil Patrick Harris may not be household names, exactly, but both had endured months, if not years of hounding by the likes of Perez Hilton, a particularly shameless online gossip-monger who makes it entirely his business to "out" as many Hollywood people as possible without regard for privacy or libel laws.
The impact of their coming out remains to be seen, but will be keenly watched by everyone in the industry. Both Grey's Anatomy and How I Met Your Mother have done well enough to guarantee multi-season runs, which suggests that the two actors will remain in work for the foreseeable future.
After those shows fall away, it is anybody's guess what will happen next. Either their careers will fall apart or, just conceivably, another big Hollywood taboo might at last be broken.
A few notes:
By pointing out that Eve Gordon is a heterosexual making an observation on homosexuality, the article proves its own point.
Charlize Theron did, in fact, win an Oscar for Monster.
To emphazine Deitch's point that "lesbian characters almost invariably end up either in a bisexual love triangle or dead," Tom Hanks dies of Aids in Philadelphia; Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain are violently murdered (the latter perhaps only on screen); Charlize Theron is a serial killer in Monster. The necrology of gay characters in Hollywood is long and virtually all-inclusive.
For further viewing: The Celluloid Closet
The Independent, December 2006
The article focuses on two television actors, but Hollywood is Hollywood and that means movies.
Sometimes, Hollywood's secrets spill out in the most surprising ways. Back in October, two of the stars on Grey's Anatomy, the hottest hospital drama show on American television, had a raging fight on the set. Isaiah Washington was ready to go with a scene, but some of the other actors were not. He and Patrick Dempsey - who both play surgical residents in a fictional Seattle hospital - started exchanging words and, at one point, Washington grabbed Dempsey by the throat. According to news reports at the time, Washington said: "I'm not your little faggot like that guy." Or something along those lines.
The remark was probably meant as no more than a rebuke of Dempsey and his apparent expectation that Washington would work to his schedule. But the gossip-mongers on the internet quickly started asking who exactly the "faggot" might be. Was one of the cast-members on the show gay? So far, so trivial. But then something thoroughly unexpected happened. T R Knight, a 33-year-old actor on the show who plays an emphatically heterosexual doctor called George O'Malley, issued a statement to People magazine. "I guess there have been a few questions about my sexuality, and I'd like to quiet any unnecessary rumours that may be out there," he said. "While I prefer to keep my personal life private, I hope the fact that I'm gay isn't the most interesting part of me."
In the showbusiness world, this was little short of a bombshell. Hollywood may fancy itself as a politically progressive sort of place, where gay people are not only accepted but are employed in large numbers. But the unwritten rule - unchanged in many decades - is that no actor ever admits he is homosexual. Especially not a young, good-looking actor whose character, like Dr O'Malley, conducts on-screen relationships with one attractive woman after another.
Knight's coming out was not the only surprise of the season. A few weeks later, some of the blunter showbiz bloggers on the internet started murmuring about another prominent television actor, Neil Patrick Harris, who is currently starring in a sitcom called How I Met Your Mother, playing an inveterate womaniser. Harris made his name as a teenage performer in the Steven Bochco - David E Kelley comedy Doogie Howser[, M.D.] about a child prodigy. He then played a drugged out version of himself in the cult 2004 film Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.
In late October, a website called Canada.com posted a nasty little item that started: "Nepotism is alive and well in Hollywood." It went on to suggest that Harris had secured a guest role on How I Met Your Mother for a fellow actor it referred to as his boyfriend. Harris's publicist issued a statement stating that Harris "is not of that persuasion", only to be deluged in more negative publicity on the web from bloggers accusing both Harris and his publicist of hypocrisy and bad faith.
Once again, People magazine got the scoop, another personal statement from an actor acknowledging his homosexuality. "The public eye has always been kind to me, and until recently, I have been able to live a pretty normal life," Harris said. "Now, it seems there is speculation and interest in my private life .
"So, rather than ignore those who choose to publish their opinions without actually talking to me, I am happy to dispel any rumours or misconceptions and am quite proud to say that I am a very content gay man living my life to the fullest and fortunate to be working with wonderful people in the business I love."
Actors who have spent any time working in the Hollywood system are little short of stunned. It's not that there is anything faintly unusual or shocking about the existence of gay actors. Going public, though, is something that simply is not done. "It's a death sentence for your career," said Eve Gordon, a (heterosexual) film and television actress. "All my friends who are gay keep it secret. They don't even know where to draw the line socially... It's like being a Communist in the McCarthy era. It's a gigantic terror. So coming out is an incredibly brave thing to do."
That hard truth is itself a taboo topic of conversation in 2006. This, after all, was touted as the year of the gay movie, thanks to the success and multiple awards showered on Brokeback Mountain, Capote and other titles featuring openly gay characters. Hollywood likes to think of itself as a bastion of sexual tolerance. When gay men started going down with Aids in disproportionate numbers in the 1980s, Hollywood rushed to raise money and awareness of the disease and destigmatise its causes.
The Aids crisis, in turn, made it easier to break one taboo - the depiction of gay characters on screen. Tom Hanks' Oscar-winning turn as a lawyer dying of Aids in Philadelphia (1992) was undoubtedly the big turning point in that battle. Before that, playing gay was regarded as a possible threat to an actor's future career. After that, it became positively desirable.
According to Donna Deitch, who wrote and directed the groundbreaking lesbian romance Desert Hearts in the mid-1980s, playing a gay character is now seen on a par with playing an autistic character, or a schizophrenic, or someone with horrible physical deformities. "That's where the acclaim is," she said. "Actors want to play disadvantaged people, whatever the disadvantage is...
"In 1986, when I made Desert Hearts, you couldn't get any actors of any consequence or familiarity to even consider the role of a gay character. It wasn't going to happen. Now, if you are offering a gay part, and it's a good part, people are going to jump at it. That's what's changed."
The appeal extends to female gay parts as well as male ones: Hillary Swank won an Oscar for her role as a transgendered teenager in Boys Don't Cry, and Charlize Theron came close to winning another one when she played the real-life lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003). The one difference, Deitch pointed out sardonically, is that lesbian characters almost invariably end up either in a bisexual love triangle or dead. "Only in Desert Hearts," she said, "do they live happily ever after."
But playing gay and admitting to being gay are two completely different things. When it comes to the latter, Hollywood still adheres to the mentality that American audiences look to their on-screen idols as outlets for their own romantic fantasies and thus need to think of them as strictly heterosexual. The mentality is not necessarily wrong - homophobia is certainly widespread in the American heartland, as evidenced by the slew of recent state ballot initiatives condemning gay marriage. But it does suggest a certain failure of the imagination. Actors, after all, are professionals who make audiences believe they are something they are not. If a straight actor like Hanks can play a gay character convincingly, why shouldn't a gay actor play straight? The fear goes deeper still: the actors seeking out gay parts, like Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, or Greg Kinnear in the Jack Nicholson comedy As Good As It Gets, are all unambiguously heterosexual in real life. They are, as one veteran Hollywood actor put it, "beyond suspicion". You don't have to believe the scurrilously persistent - and vehemently denied -rumours concerning Tom Cruise's sexuality to understand that Hollywood's most visible leading man is never ever going to play a gay character on screen.
There are exceptions to the rule. A openly gay character actor such as Sir Ian McKellen can work unhindered partly because of the prestige that comes of being a British stage veteran and partly because he is not expected to play heterosexual romantic leads. An actress like Ellen DeGeneres - who famously came out on her own sitcom in the late 1990s - doesn't suffer unduly because she is a comedian first and an actor only second, and because, once again, she doesn't play parts that call for her to knock the sexual socks off her male audience members.
An openly gay actor called Jack Plotnick plays a womaniser on the Lifetime Network's series Lovespring [International]. Another, called Sam Harris, plays a notably effeminate but heterosexual character on CBS's The Class. But these are not big shows, and not the sorts of actors to wind up being discussed in Entertainment Weekly and the gossip rags.
For the most part, fear continues to rule. One actor, who did not want to be named, told a story of asking after a colleague's boyfriend while the two of them were in make-up. The colleague froze, visibly upset, and later explained that he didn't want his homosexuality mentioned even in front of the hair and make-up people, for fear that word might reach the show runners and producers and jeopardise his prospects of future work.
The actor heaped considerable blame on Hollywood's power elite, many of whom, are themselves openly gay but still continue to perpetuate an atmosphere of intolerance and oppression. "A lot of people are working against gays to shore up their own closet door," the actor said. "They say it's all about the market - if people won't buy it, there's nothing they can do about it." This is, of course, the way it's been since the golden age of the Hollywood studio system. Gay actors like Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson were expected to make public displays of interest in the opposite sex. A recent biography of James Stewart revealed that, at the start of his career, Louis B Mayer was so worried about the implications of Stewart's lack of association with women that he obliged him to visit a private brothel he kept near the MGM lot. Part of the job of powerful gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who took money from the studios, was to keep the public behaviour of gay actors in check and make sure their secret stayed safe from the American public.
Something is clearly changing now, if only because of the rise of the internet and an unmistakable paparazzi culture that feasts on the personal foibles of celebrities big and small. T R Knight and Neil Patrick Harris may not be household names, exactly, but both had endured months, if not years of hounding by the likes of Perez Hilton, a particularly shameless online gossip-monger who makes it entirely his business to "out" as many Hollywood people as possible without regard for privacy or libel laws.
The impact of their coming out remains to be seen, but will be keenly watched by everyone in the industry. Both Grey's Anatomy and How I Met Your Mother have done well enough to guarantee multi-season runs, which suggests that the two actors will remain in work for the foreseeable future.
After those shows fall away, it is anybody's guess what will happen next. Either their careers will fall apart or, just conceivably, another big Hollywood taboo might at last be broken.
A few notes:
By pointing out that Eve Gordon is a heterosexual making an observation on homosexuality, the article proves its own point.
Charlize Theron did, in fact, win an Oscar for Monster.
To emphazine Deitch's point that "lesbian characters almost invariably end up either in a bisexual love triangle or dead," Tom Hanks dies of Aids in Philadelphia; Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain are violently murdered (the latter perhaps only on screen); Charlize Theron is a serial killer in Monster. The necrology of gay characters in Hollywood is long and virtually all-inclusive.
For further viewing: The Celluloid Closet
Monday, December 4, 2006
On DVD this Tuesday...
I love the holiday gift giving season. All kinds of new things make it to DVD and most of them are on sale. You can view a comprehensive list of all December 5th releases at DVD Aficionado. Among the highlights...
Sony Pictures releases The Premiere Frank Capra Collection: American Madness (1932); It Happened One Night (1934); Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); You Can't Take it with You (1938); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); and Kenneth Bowser's 1997 documentary, Frank Capra's American Dream.
From the Turner Classic Movies Archives: Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1: Two versions of Baby Face (1933, Alfred E. Green): the original pre-release director's cut and the less coherent, censored theatrical version. Baby Face, with Barbara Stanwyck in the title role, was so risque, it was censored before the 1934 Production Code went into effect. Red-Headed Woman (1932, Jack Conway) marked a turning point in Jean Harlow's career. Waterloo Bridge (1931, James Whale) stars Mae Clarke (Cagney shoved a grapefruit in her face in The Public Enemy) and features an early Bette Davis performance.
Criterion's re-issue of Grey Gardens, includs the Maysles Brothers' brand new follow-up, The Beales of Grey Gardens. Criterion has also kindly (and wisely) chosen to release The Beales of Grey Gardens separately, so anyone who already has Grey Gardens will not be forced to buy it again.
The Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant classic Holiday (1938, George Cukor) was previously only available as a part of Columbia's excellent Cary Grant Collection. It is now being released separately and just in time for New Year's Eve!
Anchor Bay celebrates the famed German director with The Wim Wenders Collection: Chambre 666 (1982); Tokyo-Ga (1985); Falsche Bewegung (1975); Lightning Over Water (1980); Der Scharlachrote Buchstabe (1973); Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky (1995) Der Amerikanische Freund (1977); and Aufzeichnungen zu Kleidern und Städten (1989)
Kino releases four silent films by Ernst Lubitch (not available as a set): Anna Boleyn (1920); Die Austernprinzessin (1919) with Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1920); Sumurun (1920); and Die Bergkatze (1921).
Sony Pictures releases The Premiere Frank Capra Collection: American Madness (1932); It Happened One Night (1934); Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); You Can't Take it with You (1938); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); and Kenneth Bowser's 1997 documentary, Frank Capra's American Dream.
From the Turner Classic Movies Archives: Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1: Two versions of Baby Face (1933, Alfred E. Green): the original pre-release director's cut and the less coherent, censored theatrical version. Baby Face, with Barbara Stanwyck in the title role, was so risque, it was censored before the 1934 Production Code went into effect. Red-Headed Woman (1932, Jack Conway) marked a turning point in Jean Harlow's career. Waterloo Bridge (1931, James Whale) stars Mae Clarke (Cagney shoved a grapefruit in her face in The Public Enemy) and features an early Bette Davis performance.
Criterion's re-issue of Grey Gardens, includs the Maysles Brothers' brand new follow-up, The Beales of Grey Gardens. Criterion has also kindly (and wisely) chosen to release The Beales of Grey Gardens separately, so anyone who already has Grey Gardens will not be forced to buy it again.
The Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant classic Holiday (1938, George Cukor) was previously only available as a part of Columbia's excellent Cary Grant Collection. It is now being released separately and just in time for New Year's Eve!
Anchor Bay celebrates the famed German director with The Wim Wenders Collection: Chambre 666 (1982); Tokyo-Ga (1985); Falsche Bewegung (1975); Lightning Over Water (1980); Der Scharlachrote Buchstabe (1973); Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky (1995) Der Amerikanische Freund (1977); and Aufzeichnungen zu Kleidern und Städten (1989)
New York Times Review of Turistas
I'm including this because of what Dargis writes about the "splatter and scream" genre in the last paragraph.
December 1, 2006
Ugly Americans, Young, Attractive and Tormented
By MANOHLA DARGIS
If stupidity were a crime, the nitwits in the cheap horror flick Turistas would be doing time in Attica. A grubby, lethally dull bid to cash in on the new extreme horror, the film turns on a conceit as frayed as Freddy Krueger’s shtick: a group of hotties stumble into the lair of a madman. Carnage ensues. Here the hapless, clueless and braless are the English-speaking tourists of the film’s title who, having gone abroad to party hearty, end up being batted about by a wacky cat with very sharp claws and a seriously sick sense of social justice.
Although his heart clearly isn’t in the more unsavory aspects of the job, namely slicing and dicing, the director, John Stockwell, does make a faint, early effort to infuse the proceedings with a smidgen of humor. The opening scene of a Brazilian bus careering wildly on a twisty rural road while the sweaty, swarthy bus driver rummages inside his nostrils (and wrestles a shift stick adorned with a pentagram), does manage to squeeze some dubious humor from the image of the freaked-out white tourist. The only problem is that in this case those fears turn out to be entirely justified, since it isn’t long before the bus is sliding down a mountain, taking that initial flicker of amused reflexivity with it.
What follows is the old splatter and scream as the interchangeable pretty girls and hard-body boys are lined up like ducks to be shot down or, in the case of one turista, gutted while still conscious. (The actors playing the ducks are similarly interchangeable; you can find their names in the accompanying credit box.) This operation, which isn’t any more disgusting than the medical surgeries that crop up on television — though it’s considerably less well-lighted — is as laughable as it is repulsive. That’s especially true when the evil doctor, Zamora (Miguel Lunardi, eyeballs popping), places one victim’s internal organs next to her fetching naked breast, a gesture that neatly encapsulates the sexual panic and misogyny that characterize the stupidest examples of extreme horror.
Apologists for vivisectionist entertainment trot out all sorts of rationales to justify the spectacle of human torture instead of just admitting that such spectacles turn them on. In this respect the horror audience, in its enthusiasm for go-go gore, is far more honest than those who hide behind the fig leaf of radical politics. Like Hostel (a critique of American arrogance, don’tcha know), which seems the most direct inspiration for Turistas, this film involves first-world tourists who are violently punished for traveling into a third-world (or third-world-like) country. Turistas plays this political angle more openly than does Hostel, since Zamora defends his blood lust by donating “gringo” organs to his country’s poor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and Jason and Freddy donate regularly to their local blood banks.
Advancements in special effects have made it easier than ever to make fictional disembowelments and the like look super-realistic. And on a fundamental level, the charnel-house aesthetics of films like Hostel, Cabin Fever and the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are not any different from the graphic passages in films like Saving Private Ryan and Flags of Our Fathers. The goals of these war movies are certainly far loftier than those of a run-of-the-mill horror divertissement, but in the end they all traffic — in part or in whole — in convincing images of extreme human suffering. Some films do it for art; others for amusement. For better and at times for worse, though, the cinema of death now appears inescapable.
Turistas is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The usual torture mixed in with gunplay, open wounds, beer, pot, discreet sex and naked female breasts.
TURISTAS
Opens today nationwide.
Directed by John Stockwell; written by Michael Arlen Ross; director of photography, Enrique Chediak; underwater director of photography, Peter Zuccarini; edited by Jeff McEvoy; music by Paul Haslinger; production designer, Marlise Storchi; produced by Mr. Stockwell, Marc Butan, Scott Steindorff and Bo Zenga; released by Fox Atomic and 2929 Productions. Running time: 89 minutes.
WITH: Josh Duhamel (Alex), Melissa George (Pru), Olivia Wilde (Bea), Desmond Askew (Finn), Beau Garrett (Amy), Max Brown (Liam), Agles Steib (Kiko) and Miguel Lunardi (Zamora).
December 1, 2006
Ugly Americans, Young, Attractive and Tormented
By MANOHLA DARGIS
If stupidity were a crime, the nitwits in the cheap horror flick Turistas would be doing time in Attica. A grubby, lethally dull bid to cash in on the new extreme horror, the film turns on a conceit as frayed as Freddy Krueger’s shtick: a group of hotties stumble into the lair of a madman. Carnage ensues. Here the hapless, clueless and braless are the English-speaking tourists of the film’s title who, having gone abroad to party hearty, end up being batted about by a wacky cat with very sharp claws and a seriously sick sense of social justice.
Although his heart clearly isn’t in the more unsavory aspects of the job, namely slicing and dicing, the director, John Stockwell, does make a faint, early effort to infuse the proceedings with a smidgen of humor. The opening scene of a Brazilian bus careering wildly on a twisty rural road while the sweaty, swarthy bus driver rummages inside his nostrils (and wrestles a shift stick adorned with a pentagram), does manage to squeeze some dubious humor from the image of the freaked-out white tourist. The only problem is that in this case those fears turn out to be entirely justified, since it isn’t long before the bus is sliding down a mountain, taking that initial flicker of amused reflexivity with it.
What follows is the old splatter and scream as the interchangeable pretty girls and hard-body boys are lined up like ducks to be shot down or, in the case of one turista, gutted while still conscious. (The actors playing the ducks are similarly interchangeable; you can find their names in the accompanying credit box.) This operation, which isn’t any more disgusting than the medical surgeries that crop up on television — though it’s considerably less well-lighted — is as laughable as it is repulsive. That’s especially true when the evil doctor, Zamora (Miguel Lunardi, eyeballs popping), places one victim’s internal organs next to her fetching naked breast, a gesture that neatly encapsulates the sexual panic and misogyny that characterize the stupidest examples of extreme horror.
Apologists for vivisectionist entertainment trot out all sorts of rationales to justify the spectacle of human torture instead of just admitting that such spectacles turn them on. In this respect the horror audience, in its enthusiasm for go-go gore, is far more honest than those who hide behind the fig leaf of radical politics. Like Hostel (a critique of American arrogance, don’tcha know), which seems the most direct inspiration for Turistas, this film involves first-world tourists who are violently punished for traveling into a third-world (or third-world-like) country. Turistas plays this political angle more openly than does Hostel, since Zamora defends his blood lust by donating “gringo” organs to his country’s poor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and Jason and Freddy donate regularly to their local blood banks.
Advancements in special effects have made it easier than ever to make fictional disembowelments and the like look super-realistic. And on a fundamental level, the charnel-house aesthetics of films like Hostel, Cabin Fever and the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are not any different from the graphic passages in films like Saving Private Ryan and Flags of Our Fathers. The goals of these war movies are certainly far loftier than those of a run-of-the-mill horror divertissement, but in the end they all traffic — in part or in whole — in convincing images of extreme human suffering. Some films do it for art; others for amusement. For better and at times for worse, though, the cinema of death now appears inescapable.
Turistas is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The usual torture mixed in with gunplay, open wounds, beer, pot, discreet sex and naked female breasts.
TURISTAS
Opens today nationwide.
Directed by John Stockwell; written by Michael Arlen Ross; director of photography, Enrique Chediak; underwater director of photography, Peter Zuccarini; edited by Jeff McEvoy; music by Paul Haslinger; production designer, Marlise Storchi; produced by Mr. Stockwell, Marc Butan, Scott Steindorff and Bo Zenga; released by Fox Atomic and 2929 Productions. Running time: 89 minutes.
WITH: Josh Duhamel (Alex), Melissa George (Pru), Olivia Wilde (Bea), Desmond Askew (Finn), Beau Garrett (Amy), Max Brown (Liam), Agles Steib (Kiko) and Miguel Lunardi (Zamora).
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