There have been a number of interesting movie books published this season, and two new volumes, both of them singled out for praise by Michael Fox, flesh out the careers of Hollywood directors who had important careers with major films to their credit but whose names generally don't make it onto the established lists of great filmmakers. Victor Fleming, the subject of Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, has the distinction of being the credited director what might be seen as the most iconic American movie classics of the early color era, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz--both of which were released in 1939, and both of which were huge productions that Fleming was brought in to complete after other hands had started filming. (Fleming's was still working on Oz when Clark Gable decreed that he would only continue in the role of Rhett Butler if Fleming was brought in to replace George Cukor, who had also done some labors on Oz. King Vidor wrapped up Oz while Fleming made his way to the GWTW set. Sam Wood also worked on GWTW for a few weeks while Fleming was recovering from exhaustion.) Fleming, whose other credits include Red Dust, Bombshell, Treasure Island, and Captains Courageous, broke into movies as a camera assistant, much valued for his mechanical prowess, before moving up to directing silent action films. Fox writes that "Sragow’s great accomplishment... is effortlessly weaving together the various film-book genres. His digressions to illuminate the careers and characters of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy are meaty and delicious, while the making-of chapters...brim with well-chosen behind-the-scenes details that illuminate the bigger picture of Fleming as a fearless pro. Sragow also gives a strong sense of the dynamics of the studio system, while dropping in any number of contemporary references and critical assessments without slowing the narrative a whit." Fleming combined a sensitive side with the man's man aura that made someone like Gable so comfortable about putting his career in his hands. And whatever one thinks of Sragow's efforts to sell him as an artist on the level of, say, Howard Hawks, he certainly got a lot done with the time given to him. He died of a heart attack in 1948, at the age of 59; his last film was Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman, the last of a long string of leading ladies with whom he'd been enjoying an affair during their off-hours.

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By the 1950s, jazz was undergoing one of its most memorable revolutions.  Swing was long dead, and bop had evolved into post-bop, with its moody blues tones balanced by often-jarring tonal shifts and improvisations that hinged on chords and scales rather than melodies.  There was something about the most inventive post-bop that seemed perfectly suited to the era's urban vibe; just as hip-hop would form the soundtrack to the big-city crime dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, a certain style of post-bop, characterized by loud brassy stings and sizzling, sub-surface rhythms made up the "crime jazz" that characterized some of the greatest <i>noir</i> films of the fifties.  Rarely did the studios entrust the writing of this style of music to actual jazz musicians, however, who in addition to being on the wrong side of the color line were considered unreliable, moody and temperamental.  Though there were a few notable exceptions -- such as the appearance of Chico Hamilton's quintet in The Sweet Smell of Success -- generally, the work fell on classically trained white studio pros the producers felt could conjure up the proper mood.

Some of the most memorable scores of the period followed this model:  Henry Mancini's impossibly tense, Latin-jazz-influenced score to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, David Raskin's haunting, echoing, almost atonal work in The Big Combo, and legitimate jazz legend Duke Ellington's jarring, ringing, near-perfect score to Anatomy of a Murder should be counted with Hamilton's work in Sweet Smell as high points of the day.  But Elmer Bernstein?  Long a controversial figure amongst devotees of Hollywood soundtracks, his work neatly divides opinion between those who think he's a hard-working, underrated genius and those who think he's a hack whose reputation for greatness rests on nothing more than having stuck around so long.  Bernstein was, likewise, no jazzman; his stuff generally had a formalist rigor that came from his classical training, and he possessed none of the soaring genius or improvisational acumen of his unrelated namesake Leonard.  Bernstein had started out in Hollywood doing low-budget Poverty Row pictures (like the infamous Robot Monster) and graduated to fame and fortune writing material that was memorable for a particularly strong, solid hook:  the martial drumming and soaring horns of The Great Escape and the rolling, triumphal stings of The Ten Commandments.  He was a student of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and the music he wrote was meant to uplift the spirit and stir the soul, not to accompany the mournful, half-crazy ruminations of a heroin junkie.  Who could possibly have known that putting him in charge of the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm would be precisely the thing to do?

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20. CASUALTIES OF WAR (1989)



Brian De Palma directed this fact-based story about a bunch of stressed-out American soldiers in Vietnam whose sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps after one of their number is killed and hatches a plan to abduct a young girl and carry her off into the brush, where she’s killed after having been gang-raped. Too painful to have achieved much commercial success, the movie is especially notable for having broken away from most other Vietnam films that came out around the same time, which to some degree or other adopted the line (increasingly fashionable as pundits and politicians insisted on putting that war behind us) that in the chaos of guerrilla war it was forgivable if our boys all went a little insane morally. The hero, played by Michael J. Fox, is the one soldier who won't participate in the rape and who does his damndest to try to get the criminals prosecuted. The irony is that, having been the only one in his crew who refused to shuck off his humanity, he's the only one who's haunted by what happened; he can't come to terms with the fact that he saw it all happen and couldn't do anything to stop it. That makes him the stand-in for everyone who knows that pointless wars are being hatched someplace and don't buy into them, but can't do anything to stop them, either.

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So it turns out that Rose McGowan is a total movie geek! (Man, does Robert Rodriguez's cup runneth over, or what?) As of last month, McGowan has been supplementing her income by co-hosting Turner Classic Movies' "The Essentials", a weekly slot where TCM host Robert Osborne chews over whichever film classic has just earned the title designation with a regular partner. The show has gone through a different co-host every season, and most of them have been best known for their behind-the-camera talents, even if some of them, such as directors Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, and Peter Bogdanovich, have also dabbled in acting. Before McGowan, Osborne's last couple of sparring partners for Osborne were film critic Molly Haskell and Carrie Fisher, who has evolved from actress to professional wisecracker. Whether it was just the luck of the draw or the gender differences had something to do with it, both Haskell and Fisher juiced the show up a little; they were more inclined to turn prickly and even quarrel with the programming choices than their predecessors had been. McGowan's selection may have something to do with the desire to add some youthful glow to its viewing demographic that once had TCM lure Rob Zombie to its studios so that he could stalk out onto the set of what looked like his mom's basement and lecture viewers about Arch Hall, Jr. at two in the morning. But to listen to McGowan talk about movies is to see that the woman does have game. And she likes The Great Escape!

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Our “In Other Blogs” survey team has been working around the clock to determine exactly how best to serve you, the “In Other Blogs” reader. The results are in, and it turns out: you like lists! This works out well for us, since our research also indicates that other blogs love to run lists. Here’s a roundup from the week in ranking pop culture ephemera.

Spout offers up both the 5 Best and the 5 Worst Directorial Sellouts of All Time. Any such “worst” list seems incomplete without Francis Ford Coppola’s Jack, and it’s hard to view Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon as a sellout since nobody was buying.

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