Friday Film Festival 005: Sixties Documentaries

I honestly don't remember what impulse suggested that I download a bunch of old documentaries. I think I might have been looking at Wikipedia's list of the films that have been selected for preservation in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. I guess I was still trying to get examples of as many wide-ranging genres as possible, before I started focusing deep on my immediate interests. But I've had these three films grouped together for a while now, and I really wanted to watch the first one, so here goes.

01. Jazz On A Summer's Day

(USA) Aram Avakian & Bert Stern · 1960

It did not disappoint: I spent the entire hour-and-a-half running time with either a big dopey grin or a look of revelatory awe on my face. If you haven't seen this movie, you should. Even if you don't (think you) like jazz, even if documentaries bore you, even if you hate the past and want to think only of the future — you should see this film.

It's not a documentary in the way we usually think of documentaries today: talking heads, arguments being advanced, a narrator with one of those "trustworthy" voices. It's rather an impressionistic concert film (I'll go ahead and say way better than Woodstock, even though I haven't seen Woodstock) showing what it might have been like to attend the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, especially if you wandered into town or down to the shore for much of the afternoon. And it's beautifully, even gorgeously, shot. Bert Sterns, the principal cameraman, was a fashion photographer, and it shows; his eye for composition, light, and color make this an exquisite document of a (somewhat) vanished era. (Mad Men fans, take note. Except also get ready for your fantasy of a past when everyone always looked elegant everywhere to crumble.)

The music is, predictably, awesome. Anita O'Day's performance here was one of the highlights of her career, and of the acts I know well, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong (with Jack Teagarden!) and Mahalia Jackson range from good to breathtaking. (Plus a rock & roll interlude with Big Maybelle and Chuck Berry! I danced in my seat.) But I'm even happier to have been introduced to people I didn't previously know, especially Chico Hamilton's minimalist rhythm piece (with guitar work from John Pisano that invents post-rock forty years early).

In addition to gorging myself on the imagery and delighting in the music, I enjoyed the movie as a sociological document. The cameras take in the audiences nearly as much as at the performers, and we get to people-watch among the crowds who came to Rhode Island to listen to jazz (and blues). The older, whiter audiences that came out for the day fade into a younger, hipper, multiracial audience for the after-sunset crowd, and the way Sterns captures all kinds of moods from boredom to reverence to gotta-dance excitement with his camera made me wish that more documentaries today would just let images of people speak for themselves. It's not Jazz On A Summer's Day isn't manipulative — it's as much a misrepresentation of reality as any concert film (e.g. it pretends everything happened in one day when the footage was shot over a period of weeks), and the emotional crescendo it takes towards the end (particularly if you know your music history) is as artfully edited as anything by Hitchcock or Kubrick.

But if you like movies, if you like music, if you like people, or even if you just like pretty pictures, you should see this film.

02. High School

(USA) Frederick Wiseman · 1968

But it may be that what planted the seeds of interest in old documentaries in my mind was a Battleship Pretension episode on which guest Matt Champagne talked about the films of Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman is (very limitedly) famous as one of the few "pure" documentarians, a man who advances no argument and doesn't even exist as far as the camera is concerned. He simply shoots and edits; no voiceovers, no interviews, no breaking the fourth wall.

This movie was his second full-length documentary (his first examined the workings of a mental institution), and it's immersive as hell. In fact I had a hard time watching it at points: the consistent focus on school staff as conflict managers (few of whom are any good at it) only needed a joke or two to be as uncomfortably hilarious as The Office. But actually, the television show it reminds me of most is Friday Night Lights — the handheld camera work, the fascinating characters, the attention to small gestures and overlooked detail in high school life.

But there's no Coach or Tami Taylor here. The adults are serving time just as much as the kids, and at best are trying to mold their sullen, whining charges into an adulthood thirty years out of date. (There's no Tim Riggins here either; these kids are gawky and underdeveloped and miserably inarticulate, like real high schoolers.) I've read a little bit of what people online have said about this movie, and the unrelieved atmosphere of oppression that they see doesn't match what I saw: the school is as dull and institutional as any school, but the teachers are just as human as the students -- and the worst of the bullying couneslors is shown in a classroom setting to be smart and challenging, even if he doesn't apply the lessons of the labor movement to his charges.

As a snapshot of its time (soundtrack: "On The Dock Of The Bay," "Simon Says," "The Dangling Conversation"), it's less interesting than as a study in the universal boredom, conflict, and fumblings toward adulthood that mark educational institutions everywhere. High schools are terrible, as Wiseman clearly acknowledges — but what's the alternative?

03. Cronique d'un été (Chronicle Of A Summer)

(France) Edgar Morin & Jean Rouch · 1960

An experiment in cinema verité in which the participants sit around discussing philosophies of life, the impossibility of the modern industrial world, and the futility of ideology — could anything be more resoundingly, yawn-inducingly French?

About halfway through, though, two things happen to electrify the languid, pause-filled conversation. First, the introduction of Marilù, an Italian immigrant whose beautiful, expressive face and willingness to get emotional about her interior world makes the film — even in the shitty VHS-to-VHS transfer which was all I could find — spring to life. Then there's the sudden realization that Marceline, the woman whose clumsy man-on-the-street interviews began the whole thing, is both a racist and a Holocaust survivor.

It still never approaches anything like the emotional pornography of modern reality television, but in its willingness to go meta — the second-to-last scene is a discussion among the participants as to how "real" they thought the previous hour of the film was (and the final scene is a conversation between the filmmakers about how well they thought it all worked) — it holds a fascination for anyone interested in process and the way that narratives can be created out of very little substance, not to mention the way that the same "story" can be read in multiple ways by different people.

And the scenes which weren't just people sitting around in apartments talking over omnipresent cigarettes and wine bottles — the long sequence going through factory worker Angelo's day, for example, or the interlude in vacation spot St. Tropez — had the usual verité appeal of allowing a peek into lives not our own. It was a pleasant wind-down from the more immediately engaging American documentaries; I'm not sure that I'd ever want to see it again (at least not in this transfer), but I'd certainly say it deserves to be more widely known by students of film.

Oh, goddamn, am I a student of film now?

Friday Film Festival 004: Réalisme Poétique

(I swear one of these days I'm actually going to post this on a Friday.)

As far as French film movements go, Poetic Realism lags far behind the New Wave of the late 50s and early 60s in terms of popular recognition and critical interest, but the loose collection of films that have been grouped together under its heading constitute probably the first great film movement of the sound era. Without the inventiveness, patience, and lyricism of its great directors (Renoir, Carné, Duvivier), French film might well have been just another regional entertainment system producing dull costume dramas and lame popular comedies instead of the world's greatest repository of cinematic brilliance — outside of American film. (That's right, I've got my biases straight.)

At least that's what I've gleaned from a haphazard, lazy self-education in cinema history; before this week I hadn't watched any poetic-realist movies. But as someone much more interested in the historical roots of film than in most of its later flowering, I figured I'd want to do more than just read up on the thing. On the hundred-gig hard drive where I keep most of my movie collection, there's a folder marked "Poetic Realism" with six or seven movies inside. I chose three of them because I thought they were the most highly-praised of the genre, so why shouldn't I start with the best? And now I'm going to watch them and see what I think.

1. L'Atalante

(France) Jean Vigo · 1934

I like smallness. Like G. K. Chesterton in the quote that kicked off this blog, I admire work which operates in narrowly-defined boundaries and covers that terrain completely. There are lots of stock descriptions for this sort of thing: jewel-like, "an N in miniature," and that old standby which I've used a lot and will do doubt use again, "a minor masterpiece." So it's not very surprising that I would find a lot to love in a movie which spends most of its time on a single set: the titular canal barge that goes up and down the Seine between Paris and Le Havre.

There's a lot to chew over in this movie, from the symbolism (the wedding cortège which opens it looks more like a funeral procession, and the last shot of the long, narrow barge from above makes it look like a phallic coffin) to the psychosexual relations between the characters (Père Jules and the Kid are both a vaudeville comedy team and a hobo/punk archetype), and I'm not confident enough of my reaction to it to say more without further study; my first impression is simply that it fills in the gaps between G. W. Pabst's social realist dramas of the late 20s and the neorealism of the postwar Italy, though with an allusive, close-framed quality to much of the camera work that keeps it from ever appearing documentary: everything is an aesthetic choice.

Michel Simon as Père Jules is one of the great screen creations, like Chaplin's Little Tramp or W. C. Fields' standard character, inserted into a somewhat conventional melodrama (He's the jealous type, She wants to experience Life in the Big City), transforming both the melodrama into something deeper and stranger, and the comic caricature he seems at the beginning into something else. There are many superb sequences in this film, but the one that lingers with me is the beginning of his search through Paris for Juliete; he's filmed from so far away at first that we can't tell who it is — even though his walk and carriage have hitherto been distinctive enough to know him by silhouette — and it's only when we get up close that we recognize the long, droopy face. He's become a human being; "just another" human being if you interpret the film as ending on a downbeat note, or "at last a" human being if you see it as being triumphant.

I'm not surprised it's Jim Jarmusch's favorite movie. He's one of the rare modern directors I'd be interested in following closely.

2. Pépé le Moko

(France) Julien Duvivier · 1937

If I had to find things to love about L'Atalante, there's no such hunt to be had with Pépé le Moko. This is one of the great crime movies of the thirties, and Jean Gabin's central performance as the title character is one of the finest distillations of criminal suavity I've ever seen on screen. Sure, there are moments when it goes awry -- his attempt at "distraught" only serves to remind us how long ago 1937 was -- but think of the other cinematic gangsters on offer at the time. Preening Cagney? Sneering Robinson? Leering Raft? Compared to them Gabin exudes cool, control, and professionalism; his very quietness is menacing.

The movie looks great, too: where L'Atalante was clearly filmed cheap, on location, in a nearly experimental style, Pépé le Moko has the assurance and style of the great studio pictures of the era, its location shots in the actual Algerian Casbah only adding to the mystique and atmosphere of one of the finest mises-en-scène in crime film. In fact it's not hard to see Casablanca — especially the fantastic first twenty minutes — in Duvivier's Algiers. (Though now I'm all curious to see the Hollywood remake of Pépé, Algiers, starring Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr in 1938. I like both of them, but somehow I don't think it'll feel nearly as immediate.) Special note should also be made of the great character actors making up Pépé's gang: the idiot with the vacant smile and the sharp dresser obsessed with cup-and-ball should show up in every gangster movie, and Lucas Gridoux as the cringing, insinuating Inspector Slimane out-Lorres Lorre with a performance that would have made a superb Iago.

In fact for so much of the movie it was such a plain, if stylish, thriller that I wondered how it ever got mixed in with the Poetic Realism crowd. But the final scenes, beginning with the long walk down out of the Casbah towards the docks, answered my questions: Duvivier commits deeply psychological, even experimental filmmaking as Pépé goes to his death. (Um, spoilers, I guess.) The only outright murder in the film is filmed in a fantastic psychological nearly-noir style, too; I'm especially a fan of the horrible player piano that won't shut up, a grim counterpoint to a double death. But mostly it was just a great, sleek crime-cum-melodrama film, the kind of movie that proved that Hollywood had no monopoly on stylish, witty, and deeply felt entertainment.

3. La règle du jeu (The Rules Of The Game)

(France) Jean Renoir · 1939

One of the pitfalls of being an Anglophile for much of my adult life is that it's made it much harder to be a Francophile. It feels odd for an American to claim to be a bigger fan of repression than of passion, but I couldn't help comparing the way the aristocrats in La règle du jeu comported themselves with to the way similar aristocrats in the British books and movies I know behave. The outbursts of emotion, the resignation to human imperfection, the willingness to drink and dance and laugh — basically, I'm disoriented by a country-house party in which "making a scene" isn't understood as the worst of all possible outcomes.

All of which is beside the point of whether this is a good movie: the question is not whether I understand the emotions and actions of the characters as being appropriate for the culture I grew up in (or perhaps aspire to), but whether I believe them in the context of the movie. And of course I do; Jean Renoir's magnificent, subtle camera, constantly in motion, inserts me more fully into the world of the La Colinière, both upstairs and down, the bedrooms, the hallways, and the shooting grounds. Far more than Vigo's barge, even more so than Duvivier's Casbah, this is a world both complete within itself and wholly believable as a real space in which real people move and talk and commit adultery and murder.

Like L'Atalante, I'm going to have to watch this again — preferably the Criterion edition, as the transfer (and its subtitles) which I downloaded left a lot to be desired — but it's a superb movie, one which achieves the rare novelistic effect of being about many different people, telling many different stories, and covering many different themes: class, sex, violence, art, money, lust, failure, history, truth. Even, despite my instinctive aversion to the French style of romance (and the balancing French style of cynicism), one of the most deeply humanist movies I've seen.

(There — I told myself I could write about it without bringing up Gosford Park or Robert Altman.)

But I'm not at all sure how this is a poetic-realist film, unless the unusual immediacy of the camera work is what qualifies it; out of these three, it is the least interior, least psychological. Everything is on the surface, and that's what's great about it. In fact, after watching all three of these movies I'm far less certain of what Poetic Realism is than I was before. I suppose I'll need to spend more time watching other French films of the 1930s for comparison's sake. Well; based on how much I enjoyed myself here, that's not an unattractive prospect.

Friday Film Festival 003: Shakespeare Noir

Over the past ten years, I've become the kind of person who will say, with a weary, condescending sigh, that he doesn't really like movies. I say this for two reasons: first, as a sort of low-level guerilla warfare against the wholesale dominance of our cultural discourse by film. If I have to read one more person justifying their interest in a song/band/genre by talking about how Martin fucking Scorcese used it over the end credits of whatever, I'm going to . . . uh, roll my eyes and grumble to myself like I've been doing much of my adult life. If people are allowed to walk around saying that they don't really listen to music, or they don't really read books, or that they don't watch sports or follow politics, then surely I'm allowed to place a premium on my own interests at the expense of whatever "cultural conversation" others think I might be missing out on.

But the second reason I say it is because it's quicker than saying that I actually do like movies a lot, I just don't like movies in the way that most people like movies, or the kinds of movies that most people like, since people tend to think you're judging them when you say that. (It's why I've stopped saying I don't watch TV even though it's still factually accurate; I watch a handful of shows on my computer a while after they air, via means of varying legality. When I can find the time.) But bringing myself to acknowledge the fact that, yes, I actually do like movies after I've spent so much time saying otherwise, has been something of a journey for me.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this Friday (ha) Film Festival project owes most of its existence to the Battleship Pretension podcast, which I've been listening to for almost two years mostly because Tyler and David hang out in the L.A. comedy scene, and they had some of my favorite comedians on, and I liked what I heard and kept listening. Hearing two smart, unpretentious guys talk about movies in a smart, unpretentious way, week after week, has encouraged me to think that, hey, maybe I can like movies without surrendering to All That Shit I Don't Care For. And since my tastes are largely unrepresented in the film-geek discourse, maybe I might even have something to contribute.

Anyway, BP's most recent episode was Shakespeare In Film. (Or rather, films of Shakespeare plays; I was afraid they would get into stuff like Shakespeare In Love, but they didn't even mention it.) Not having had a Festival lined up for this week, I thought that sounded interesting; and I happened to have the materials for one lying around.

These are all black-and-white film adaptations of Shakespeare plays; they aren't necessarily the most revered versions of any of the plays, and they certainly aren't the most popular. But I, as both a fan of Shakespeare (just the standard English major's appreciation, I haven't gone full geek on his work, though I was unreasonably annoyed whenever Tyler or David, whose combined knowledge of movies vastly dwarfs mine, got something wrong about the plays) and someone who is gradually discovering within himself a keen interest in black-and-white cinematography, have really been looking forward to watching these movies for the past week.

1. Hamlet
(UK) Laurence Olivier · 1948

Hamlet is the Shakespeare play I've studied the most extensively and has a solid lock on being my favorite of the tragedies: its place as the usual junior-year-of-high-school Shakespeare play caught me at exactly the right age for the title character's self-important navel-gazing, Ophelia's wasted life and love, and the earthy humanism of the minor characters to seem like the most important things ever committed to paper. Even today it's difficult for me to think of it in any other terms but Monolithic Classic of Western Art; like Beethoven or the Sistine Chapel or Homer, it's just there, having shaped the rest of the world around it like a boulder in the path of a growing tree.

And aside from a teenage infatuation with Helena Bonham Carter as Mel Gibson's Ophelia, I've been snobbily unimpressed with any of the screen adaptations I've seen — perhaps especially Kenneth Branagh's four-hour slog through the written play, in which turns by Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams were only interesting in being utterly out of place. (I'd have preferred a Hamlet pitched at the level they were playing it; but then I've only ever enjoyed Branagh as Benedick.) And it occurs to me now that black-and-white was the missing element; somehow, even though I wasn't aware of the Olivier version in high school, its moody, stark contrasts were what I was picturing in my head the whole time.

And its art direction is simply ravishing; Olivier's Hamlet, dark-clothed with pale face and hair, stands out like a Harlequin in the chorus of grays that make up the set. This Elsinore, with its vast empty spaces and exposed, crumbling architecture, has its own proto-Gothic character: neither Hamlet's nor Ophelia's descent into madness seems particularly suprising here. (Jean Simmons as Ophelia is surprisingly effective even though she's beggared by the older cast members who between them had a couple centuries' worth of experience playing Shakespeare.) The kind of savage interiority with which Olivier approaches the title role is reflected in the deep-focus camera work, with plunging, twisting shots that keep us off-balance; the entire set, beautifully constructed though it is, might as well be a metaphor for the multi-chambered ruins of Hamlet's own collapsing psyche.

Olivier plays Hamlet with a raw physicality that not even Mel Gibson the action hero attempted; the seeming disconnect between his troubled, digressive interior dialogue (I'm not sure what I think about the choice to render much of the great soliloquies in voiceover) and the constant energy of his body is resolved in the final act, when camera trickery and interior monologues are dispensed with, and mind and body finally unite in the gorgeously-staged duel with Laertes. Apparently Olivier was largely inspired by Freud's reading of the play (the scenes with Gertrude make this obvious); but the existentialist reading, in which action however doomed is preferable to inaction, is the one that springs clearest to my eyes.

I wouldn't call it a perfect movie; the editing in particular leaves something to be desired, and any Hamlet that leaves out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is fatally incomplete. But it's a fantastic first step on this quick little trip.

2. Othello

(USA) Orson Welles · 1952

Othello happens to be one of the handful of Shakespeare plays I haven't previously read or seen any performance of, though like any moderately well-informed participant in Western culture I know the story. So watching this for the first time was as much nailing down the specifics of plot and character outside the Othello-Desdemona-Iago trinity as it was determining how the movie worked as an adaptation. I found the dialogue a little tough to follow at times, but I'm not sure how much that can be attributed to my unfamiliarity with much of the original text as opposed to the odd editing choices that were forced upon the filmmakers.

The story of the difficult and scattershot filming of Othello has been much rehashed elsewhere; all I can say is that it shows. The editing is sometimes amateurish to the point of delinquency, as in shots where people plainly speak but no dialogue is heard, monologues delivered with the back to the camera, and frequent disunity of tone between vocals and image — of course all this can be justified as contributing to an atmosphere of deliberate destabilization, Othello's world breaking down around him even as his trust in Desdemona breaks down, but I can't help believing a larger budget, reserved studio space, and no breaks in shooting would have left these apparent avant-gardisms on the floor.

All that said, there is some bravura filmmaking in there (and even when the filmmaking, in terms of sequential motion, isn't so hot, the individual images are always superbly composed), as of course one would expect from Welles. The dialogue-free pre-titles sequence is spectacular, setting a mood and casting a spell which the rest of the movie never quite lives up to, a severer and more intense mini-film than anything armed with mere words could be. Welles may not have been an auteur in the sense that there was a through-line or clear connecting themes to his movies, but in the sense of having a total mastery of his cinematic tools, he was undoubtedly one of the greatest.

Which leads us to his performance; a good one, if fatally compromised by the dual decisions to cast him as Othello and then to put him in blackface for it. I recognize that it's historically been an uncontroversial choice, that actors were blacking up for Othello long before American minstrelsy gave blackface the particular shame and disgust it carries today, but it's not like great black actors didn't exist in the late 40s and early 50s, or that Welles didn't know about them. (He produced an all-black Macbeth in 1936, and Paul Robeson had performed the role to great acclaim in England in 1931 and America in 1943.) But of course film financing was not theater financing, and the willingness of audiences in America or Europe to countenance the image of a powerful, sexually desirable black man killing a white woman — even in the name of High Culture — was limited. The result is a compromised movie, and I can't watch Welles in the role without thinking of him as "Othello," in quotes, and mentally substituting an actual black man.

It's a compromised movie regardless; immensely rewarding in spots, certainly, and I'd sooner watch it again than see Olivier's version — also in blackface, and (shudder) in color — though Laurence Fishburne looks tempting. (Oh, ninteen-nineties. Is there any adaptation you didn't attempt?) But first of all, I really need to read the play.

3. A Midsummer Night's Dream

(USA) Max Reinhardt & William Dieterle · 1935

After these intense, nearly experimental Shakespeares, let's cleanse the palate with a bubbly studio-system production. Olivia de Havilland as Hermia? Dick Powell as Lysander? Jimmy Cagney as Bottom? Mickey Rooney as Puck? Joe E. Brown having any business there at all? Sounds terrible, and it mostly is. But I have a weakness for studio adaptations of classic literature from the thirties and forties (like the truly godawful Greer Garson Pride & Prejudice), and find the professionalism of a certain type of character actor when entirely misapplied to a role incredibly entertaining.

It's a good thing that A Midsummer Night's Dream is impossible to take seriously, because it's sure as hell impossible to take this movie even as intentional comedy. It's camp through and through, and all the better for it. Half the cast doesn't even attempt an English accent, the other half plays it as broad as if the movie were silent, and the art design and costuming is so outlandish as to cross the border into silly. In one magnificently ludicrous moment early on, Dick Powell pretends to adjust a tie his fake-Elizabethan's-fake-Athenian costume doesn't have, then sings a snatch of the "Wedding March" from Mendelssohn score to A Midsummer Night's Dream.

That snatch of Mendelssohn is important: Reinhardt (adapting his stage production) and Dieterle (stretching his muscles for fantasy) use the score so much that the movie is practically a musical, the most familiar and easy-to-get form of cinematic fantasy in the thirties. And where it's not a musical, it's a pantomime, with as obnoxiously a twee, hyperactive crew of fairies as anyone who's suffered through "classic" children's entertainment of the period has heard. Rooney's Puck in particular is so manic as to be the stuff of legend, nearly as unwatchable as his infamous turn in Breakfast At Tiffany's though for wholly different reasons. If I were Oberon, I'd smack him good for every inane giggle and stupid shriek. But despite all that, there's a generous spirit to the fairy sequences, an lavish sense of spectacle, an giddy orgy of design and special effects that predicts The Wizard Of Oz or even in spots Lord Of The Rings.

But if Rooney is the worst thing about the movie, Cagney as Bottom is surely the best: even when his expressive features are obscured by one of the worst donkey masks I've ever seen (never try to make it animatronic; you just look stupid sixty years later), his dancer's posture and nimble hands do more than anyone else in the frame with all their faculties. Though Dick Powell does pull the most astonishing faces, as though he were making fun of the entire thing; in fact the four-way fight between Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius and Helena is a minor masterpiece of over-the-top camp, even squashing as much of the play as possible into the smallest space by having all four deliver lines at the same time. Still, the rude mechanicals are the most straightforwardly funny thing in the film, the thirties' broad style of comedy being a far better match to the similarly broad antics of the Shakespearean clowns than the Victorian sentiment of Titania or the Powell's Broadway swagger.

The copy I have is a disgustingly low-quality VHS rip, so I'm not bothering to pull a clip from it, but I can make out just enough of the picture through the grainy distortion that I'd love to see a crisp DVD transfer -- while the performances may be amusingly out of sync with modern tastes, the glittery, wholly artificial sets and costuming are still something of a gold standard for black-and-white fantasy, a triumph of visual and cinematic ideas over theatrical and actorly execution. The play is one of my favorite Shakespeare comedies, and if this film owes more to early-twentieth-century conventions of pantomime and film comedy than to anything Shakespeare wrote, it's nevertheless hugely enjoyable on its own merits.

You do have to have the stomach for it, though.

Obviously, this brief list in no way exhausts the black-and-white canon of Shakespeare; there are at least ten others I could have chosen, not including Chimes At Midnight or Throne Of Blood. But these are the three I wanted to see the most just now; and so to bed.

Friday Film Festival 002: Lubitsch's Second Tier

Ernst Lubitsch is no longer in the first rank of directors that spring to mind when people talk about the classic Hollywood era. Even though he was revered as a master by many of the (now) more famous directors in the generation after his (Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger), the usual center of gravity in Hollywood — the stars — tended not to congregate in Lubitsch pictures, which were instead populated largely by character actors.

In fact, of the five movies that I consider to be his best — his first-tier films, if you will — only one contains a genuine star: Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (1939). The others, for the record, are Trouble In Paradise (1932), The Shop Around The Corner (1940), To Be Or Not To Be (1942), and Heaven Can Wait (1943). (And yes, Jimmy Stewart's in The Shop Around The Corner, but he wasn't a star yet, and I'd argue that he was always a character actor anyway.)

I'd encourage you to rent, borrow, or torrent all of the above, and put on your own Friday Film Festival, watching them in the order that they were made. Lubitsch's deeply humane, generous-minded, and erotically comic vision of life — he made movies for adults about adults, and was both wise and very funny about love and sex and marriage and idealism and compromise and deceit — makes up one of the most emotionally satisfying filmographies I've come across.

But tonight's Friday Film Festival is not about those movies. Those movies are all readily available on DVD, borrowable from any decent library, and essayed about to death elsewhere on the internet. Tonight is about the three second-tier Lubitsch movies I happen to have on my hard drive at the moment.

In my head, following the lead of most film historians, I divide Lubitsch into three periods: his silent period (which was when he actually grew famous for "the Lubitsch touch"), his musical period (1929-1935, when Jeannette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier were his most frequent muses), and his extended comic period, of which the five movies listed above are some of the greatest movies ever made and even when he wasn't on his game (1941's That Uncertain Feeling, say, about which Burgess Meredith's deadly Oscar Levant impression is about the only memorable thing), he was still pretty great.

1. Cluny Brown

(USA) Ernst Lubitsch · 1946

Cluny Brown is the kind of movie that, had it been made by Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini or Jean Renoir in the same year, would long have been enshrined in the world cinema canon as a subtle masterpiece of sexual sublimation and exquisite social satire, with its own Criterion catalogue number and a sober-minded Peter Bogdanovich DVD commentary. The fact that European directors are the first to come to mind when making comparisons like these is hardly an accident — for decades at a stretch, it could seem as though Ernst Lubitsch was the only man in Hollywood watching what Europeans, especially the more hyper-civilized and sophisticated among them, were doing in the 1930s and 40s.

Of course, Lubitsch was thoroughly European himself, a German-born Jew who loved to set his movies among the moneyed elite and then puncture their world with infidelity, deceit, and a wit that was never quite as quick as it was sharp. Lubitsch films require patience, just like the Europeans I compared him to above — and they reward it just as handsomely.

Of course, if Cluny Brown had been directed by any of those Euros, it wouldn't have had its signature flaws, either: Jennifer Jones is frequently luminous in the title role, but her attempt at an English accent is hardly any better for being abandoned early on. For Cluny Brown is set in England, based on an English novel, and features a largely English cast. (In fact, Anthony Asquith or Powell & Pressburger could have done marvelous work with it, now that I think of it.) I own and have read the comedy-of-manners novel (I even wrote about it four years ago; and am ashamed to note I repeat myself here), and the movie's all the better for adding Lubitsch's adult themes, witty realism (especially as delivered by Charles Boyer, playing a refugee who lives by his wits), and fantastic social satire. The clip below shows Lubitsch at his best (even if Jones is clearly out of her depth):

By the way, with that "bang, bang, bang" bit, Cluny is referring to the first scene in the movie, in which she unstops a clogged sink by banging on the pipes with a wrench; plumbing is her passion, and serves Lubitsch well as a metaphor for sex. (The fact that such necessaries of civilized life are supposed to be too vulgar for the ultra-proper British to mention only adds to the fun.) The climactic scene in the film, in which Cluny is rejected by her hilariously prissy lover Wilson (that's him in the picture up top) because of her earthy enjoyment of plumbing — she even spreads her legs to fit the pipe between them, is how blatant Lubitsch is about it, and looks as ecstatically disheveled afterwards as though she's been through orgasm — is hilarious on at least four levels (visually, socially, sexually, and verbally), as well as being emotionally fraught. We don't like Wilson, but we don't want Jennifer Jones to look like that about it.

As for the rest of the movie, Peter Lawford is about as good as he ever was before chucking it to be part of Sinatra's gang, the British character actors are uniformly excellent, and the location shooting is gorgeous. It was Lubitsch's last full film; he would die the following year — in flagrante, if rumors are true — and while it doesn't have the rich humanism of A Shop Around The Corner or the tense black comedy of To Be Or Not To Be (though he gets in a few jabs in at Hitler nevertheless), it's a worthy capstone to a career which savored the light, the elegant, and the winking.

2. Design For Living

(USA) Ernst Lubitsch · 1933

And then sometimes the winking wasn't so much winking as plain speech. Design For Living is an astonishingly frank movie even today; the closing scene, with its cheerful acceptance of ménage à trois as the solution to all life's difficulties, would still be controversial nearly eighty years since it was filmed. And in between, there's unmarried sex, cheating sex, married sex, and lots and lots of making fun of the squares.

The fact that it was originally a highly successful Noël Coward play (co-starring the married king and queen of the New York theater, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne) no doubt gave Lubitsch more leeway than he would have had otherwise; but even as it was, he got it in just under the wire; in 1934, it was refused a re-release certificate by the newly stern Production Code Authority for gross immorality and withdrawn from circulation until the post-Code era. The following exchange might be tame by modern standards, but I blinked when I heard the word "sex" actually spoken in black-and-white.

Like Cluny Brown, it isn't a perfect film; even apart from what it did to Coward's far more cynical, forthright, and witty original play (he sniffed that "pass the mustard" was the only line that survived from his script — and no one ever says "pass the mustard" in the film), it's tonally uneven, switching from comedy to melodrama to farce to satire based purely on what's happening plotwise, without the lightness of touch needed in both script and acting to keep it all floating along together. (Lubitsch's usual screenwriter, Samuel Raphaelson, refused to tamper with Coward, so Ben Hecht, better known for hard-boiled ratatat scripts with Charles McMurray, did the job; on his own, Hecht's tonally uneven too. I have some novels.)

Frederic March is winningly terrific as a less-sophisticated-than-he-thinks playwright, and Gary Cooper, though far too ruggedly handsome, is fine in the role of a painter with caveman instincts. But Miriam Hopkins' brittle, stagey performance of the key role in the film nearly sinks the entire thing — we're supposed to believe that she's so fascinating that at least three men are madly in love with her, but she never seems to be thinking about anything but what her next line is. Add in Edward Everett Horton as the fourth wheel — while he was always great as his one character, he should never be anything but comic relief, and applied in limited doses there -- and the tonal imbalance becomes too much to take halfway through.

Luckily, there's more than story to this movie. It's a gorgeous film. Hans Dreier's art direction, taking cues from French Impressionism, Italian Futurism, Mexican Muralism, and German Expressionism, and Victor Milner's cinematography (the background shadows alone are fascinating) make for a sumptous visual feast; and if the mise-en-scène can sometimes be a trifle stagebound thanks to the originating play, Lubitsch is always doing interesting things with the camera, with blocking, and with bits of business. The title of the play was originally a pun because the female character as played by Lynn Fontanne was an interior designer; when Hecht changed Hopkins' version to a commercial artist, Lubitsch and his team managed to retain the pun by just designing the hell out of the movie.

3. Bluebeard's Eighth Wife

(USA) Ernst Lubitsch · 1938

And then sometimes you turn out a stinker.

I'd seen Cluny Brown before. I'd even sat through the first scene of Design For Living. ButBluebeard's Eighth Wife was entirely new to me, though I have a vague feeling I might have seen it in childhood; unless that's just the sensation of being put through the standard paces in a heartless farce where everyone's unlikeable and nothing matters.

I'm a defender of the Hollywood studio system, but it was far more likely to turn out mediocre movies than great ones, and during the mediocrities, you take your pleasures where you can get them. In this one, those pleasures are just about wrapped up in David Niven as a dim aristocrat who can't quite get used to being poor, Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn doing their usual, and one great battle-of-the-sexes scene:

Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert are both extremely attractive people who made some very good movies. This is not one of them. It's the kind of farce that ends with one party in a straitjacket being kissed against his will; with none of the sympathetic view towards human frailty or rich interest in the varieties of human experience which that implies. Lubitsch was famous for his witty, urbane comedy, but this is broad slapstick, and he wasn't very good at it. (Billy Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay, would learn to do it better; the similarly goofball ending to Some Like It Hot is justly famous.)

Maybe it's because I stayed up way too late to watch this and I'm sleepy and crabby, but this movie stank and even if Lubitsch is one of my favorite directors I don't have to pretend to like it.

At his best, Ernst Lubitsch had a deeply compassionate, slyly wise vision of human nature which came out naturally in comedy which was delicate, understated, and smartly interrogated the nature, source, and effect of moral and immoral thought and behavior. A champion of frivolity, of manners, and of the unexpected laugh, Lubitsch nevertheless made movies about eternal themes like love and marriage and betrayal. They say that comedy is tragedy that keeps going; a lot of serious-minded filmmakers today are making a lot of half-a-Lubitsch films.

Friday Film Festival 001: My Top Ten Movies

It’s still (barely) Friday as I write this, so this will have to count as the inaugural edition of the Friday Film Festival here at Things Saved From The Wreck. What I intend to do in the future is to watch three (or so) movies grouped together on whatever pretext I can muster, then talk about them here; but I thought for this first run-through I’d let you know where I’m coming from, filmwise.

I’ve labeled the following list as my Ten Favorite for convenience’ sake, but I also love plenty of more recent movies, some far more some that show up here. But this is the era I’m most comfortable in (roughly 1930 to 1950), the era I’ve thought and read most deeply about, and I thought I’d rather have a list unified in its thematic coherence than have to work a little more to think about what else I like and why.

These are all black and white movies made not only before I was born but before my father was born. That kind of thing makes up the bulk of my film collection, both on DVD and torrented. If you’re not interested, then fuck you, Debbie. (Please tell me you get the reference.) Meanwhile, here’s what I think about ten movies I like more than most others I could have named:

10. The Thin Man

(USA) W. S. Van Dyke · 1934

Detection enlivened by boozy drawing-room comedy, almost entirely faithful to Dashiell Hammett’s snappy novel, and featuring the bantering husband-and-wife team that dreams are made of. Nick and Norah Charles are still the gold standard for successful marriages in modern fiction; how often do you watch a murder mystery wishing the plot would go away so you could just hang out with the detectives?

9. It Happened One Night

(USA) Frank Capra · 1934

The usual line about this movie is that it’s an early precursor to Screwball Comedy; but my preference is to think of it as the Great American Romance. Capra’s populist cheerleading is tempered by Gable’s prickly exterior and Colbert’s aristocratic hauteur; but even in the middle of Depression-era starvation, we’re forced to remember that the rich are people too.

8. Stage Door

(USA) Gregory La Cava · 1937

George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote the stage play, and the screen positively sings with their flashing wit, particularly in any of the boarding-house scenes, where men are unwelcome and not missed. But the backbone of the film is the performances: Ginger Rogers’ no-shit-taking working girl, Katharine Hepburn’s coolly arrogant Dramatic Actress, and down the line to Andrea Leeds’ luminous, heartbreaking has-been.

7. Trouble In Paradise

(USA) Ernst Lubitsch · 1932

Lubitsch was the greatest of Hollywood’s “sophisticated” directors in the early Golden Age, a man who could slip more than most past the censors due to his handiness with misdirection and implication. They called it the “Lubitsch touch” at the time, and if that touch can be so light as to be nearly imperceptible today, his way with witty, loaded dialogue was never given better voice than by Herbert Marshall’s cultivated thief, Kay Francis’ voluptuous millionaire, and Miriam Hopkins’ jealous accomplice.

6. My Man Godfrey

(USA) Gregory La Cava · 1936

This has a far better claim to being called the First of the Screwball Comedies, and it features the Queen of the Screwballs, Carole Lombard, in a giggly, shrewdly airheaded masterpiece of a performance that would set the standard for Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth, Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, and Marilyn Monroe in anything. William Powell, trying nobly to star in a much more serious picture about money, class, and disappointment, has about as much chance against her as a levee in a hurricane.

5. The Bride Of Frankenstein

(USA) James Whale · 1935

Perhaps the first ever sequel that turned out to be better than the first movie, this is unquestionably the greatest fantasy film of the studio era. And make no mistake, it is pure fantasy — for all Henry Frankenstein’s dippy, conflicted monologues about “science,” it’s Dr. Pretorius who really knows what’s up. A new world of gods and monsters indeed; and the Bride’s own brief, five-minute lifetime remains one of the most indelible images ever committed to celluloid.

4. Top Hat

(USA) Mark Sandrich · 1935

But then fantasies come in so many different forms. Musicals require their own special suspension of disbelief — and the magic of Fred Astaire dancing is as incredible and impressive as any CGI monster, greenscreen vista, or wire-fu battle. The story is even slighter than average for an Astaire-Rogers pairing, which only makes the wait between numbers that much more entertaining; the only time to take them seriously is when they dance.

3. The Philadelphia Story

(USA) George Cukor · 1940

The play was written by Philip Barry explicitly as a comeback vehicle for Katharine Hepburn after a string of flops got her labeled “box office poison.” It was a triumph; a film version was inevitable. But opposite Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart? Hepburn came more fully to life than she had done yet on screen, her portrayal of the brittle, insecure “goddess” Tracy Lord running the gamut from A to at least C, possibly even E. The screenplay’s insistence on humanity at all costs would even find an echo in Robert Altman’s humanist manifesto Gosford Park, which borrows a line of dialogue as true today as it ever has been: “The time to make up your mind about people is never.”

2. Casablanca

(USA) Michael Curtiz · 1942

Even if were the most dull-witted, sentimental, hackneyed, muddily-shot, and weakly-acted movie in history, it would retain its potent iconicity through the handful of lines and moments everyone knows: “I stick my neck out for no one.” “Play it, Sam.” “Of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine.” “Here’s looking at you, kid.” “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” “Round up the usual suspects.” “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” But it’s not; it’s full of delight, clear-eyed, unusually brave, beautiful, and even its minor characters are masterfully weighted and portrayed. It’s perfection, the single movie where all the elements that were supposed to work together in the assembly-line movie-a-week studio system without any singular guiding vision at work, aligned into this one jewel-like pattern of a film, then drifted away again. And there’s never been a more beautiful woman than Ingrid Bergman. Ever.

1. Sullivan’s Travels

(USA) Preston Sturges · 1941

And yet when you come down to it is there any replacement for that singular guiding vision? Preston Sturges’ movies did well at the time, but it’s only within the last ten to fifteen years that they’ve really come into their own, seen as part of the major fabric of Hollywood filmmaking rather than a weird side tributary. Sullivan’s Travels is the American epic in miniature, a movie that tackles everything its pretentious title character wants to — social conditions and injustice and greed and despair and death and the inhumanity of man to man — but without the pretension, going through the wisecracking studio paces to find a deeper humanism than any grim fistfight between Capital and Labor could possibly approach. It’s no mistake that the Coen Brothers borrowed the title of Sullivan’s imaginary screenplay for their own cockeyed caravan through the motions of a literary classic: their own humanism is also fueled in its primary instance by the fierce drive to entertain. Laughter is a sacrament — and what is all myth, all religion, all history but tell us a story . . . with a little sex.

My film education is woefully incomplete — I haven’t seen, for example, anything directed by Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorcese or Jim Jarmusch or Clint Eastwood or Akira Kurosawa or Federico Fellini or Harold Ramis or Michael Bay. I don’t particularly intend to rectify those omissions, either: out of all the major art forms, cinema is the one that interests me the least. Like all those guys who think of themselves as music nerds but never listen to jazz or classical or country or hip-hop or electronic or teen-pop, I have a fairly specific taste in film and not much interest in branching out; but unlike some of them, I don’t pretend that my vision of cinema is the only coherent or worthwhile one available.

It is, nevertheless, mine; and for whatever it’s worth, here it will continue to be. See you next week. Sorry about the wait; I’ll try to get the room reserved in advance next time.