The Screengrab : fred astaire

Reviews By Request, Oscar-Nominated Edition: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, Michael Curtiz)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As usual, I’ll be polling you folks to determine the subject for the second of two Oscar-themed Reviews By Request columns, which will run in two weeks. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

It’s practically become a running joke that biopics are catnip to Oscar voters. It’s not difficult to see the reasons why- the historical setting gives affords technicians plenty of chances to show off, while audiences enjoy seeing the lives of their heroes brought to life through movie magic. Most of all, playing historical figures often gives actors an opportunity to show facets of their talent that aren’t normally on display. Nowhere is this more apparent than in biographies of musicians or other live performances, in which actors get the chance to not only portray real-life characters but also perform their work- in character, anyway. And of all the acclaimed showbiz biopic performances out there, few are more beloved than James Cagney’s Oscar-winning turn as George M. Cohan in Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy.

As showbiz biopics go, Yankee Doodle Dandy has a pretty standard trajectory. We follow Cohan from his birth through his early days on the road, performing in vaudeville shows with his parents and sister as “The Four Cohans.” By the time he’s a teenager, young George has become good enough that he gets cocky; and despite his undeniable talent he’s been largely blackballed from the business by the time he’s hit adulthood. It’s only by composing his own material- combined with a lot of luck- that George makes a name for himself on Broadway, eventually becoming its biggest star. And all the while, he sticks by his family (including his dad, played by Walter Huston), and in turn his loving wife Mary (Joan Leslie) sticks by him.

And yet, compared to most movies of this sort, Yankee Doodle Dandy has almost no interest in the darker undercurrents of its protagonist. There’s a very good reason for this- made in the early years of World War II, the filmmakers wanted to tell the rousing story of a homefront hero, a patriot who served his country not with a gun but with songs like the World War I anthem “Over There.” This comes through clearest in the movie’s (supposedly apocryphal) framing device, in which Cohan is called to the White House late one night so that FDR can personally present him with the Congressional Gold Medal. And while this makes the film pretty hopeless as biography- as Cohan himself allegedly quipped after the premiere, “It was a good movie. Who was it about?”- it’s rousing entertainment all the same. In light of the tendency of many contemporary biopics to air out their protagonists’ dirty laundry, the film’s refusal to do so is perhaps its most refreshing aspect. Yankee Doodle Dandy is content to let its hero be a hero.

But the film would be nothing without Cagney’s infectious performance. Like many moviegoers of the time, I mostly knew Cagney through his hard-boiled gangster roles, combined his great late-period turns in films like Billy Wilder’s awesome One, Two, Three. But while I always knew he was an energetic actor, I wasn’t prepared for the high spirits he would bring to the role of George M. Cohan. The role had been turned down by the likes of Fred Astaire, and while Cagney wasn’t the dancer Astaire was (or the singer, for that matter- Cagney probably speak-sings half his lyrics), he throws himself so completely into the role that it scarcely matters. Cagney’s irrepressible desire to entertain is matched only by his inventiveness, as in the scene in which he first meets his eventual wife while covered in old-age makeup. It’s an irresistible performance, and one I dare say the Academy would’ve been hard-pressed to overlook even if it wasn’t based on a real person.

Yankee Doodle Dandy isn’t a movie about the life of George M. Cohan so much as it is about the myth of George M. Cohan. Consequently, it scarcely matters that Cohan was actually born on July 3rd, that the movie’s “Mary” was actually his second wife, or that the circumstances under which he received his Congressional Gold Medal were somewhat different than they are in the film. What matters is that, like its hero, it’s filled to the brim with an unabashed flag-waving spirit, and anchored with Cagney’s timeless, inspired performance. Yankee Doodle Dandy is cornball to be sure, but it’s the kind of movie that gives cornball a grand old name.

For the second Oscar-themed Reviews By Request column, I’m asking you to choose from five Best Picture-winning films I’ve never seen. So, which will it be?

Which should I review for my next Reviews By Request? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "White Christmas"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:15:00 GMT

After the horrors of Silent Night Deadly Night, it was a relief that the next movie that showed up in the pile of holiday DVDs I drunkenly knocked over while prepping for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon was a good old-fashioned heartwarming musical. Of course, a lot of people really, really hate musicals, and would rather watch jolly old St. Nick ventilating craniums with a wood axe on endless loop than hear some cheeseball from the Golden Age of Hollywood belt out a single rousing number, so for some of our readers, this might be a significant turn for the worse. However, I will tell you now that those readers are wrong. White Christmas is a wonderful movie, and despite not having any killing in it (well, except for the World War II stuff, I guess), it is superior in every way to our previous movie.

White Christmas is what was once known in the biz as a "jukebox musical". This is where, rather than writing new songs for a production, a bunch of already-existing hit songs are thrown together, a half-assed 'plot' is woven to tie them loosely together, and they are unleashed on an audience who, it is reasoned, will make the jukebox musical a huge success, because you already know that they like these songs. Contemporary audiences tend to think of the jukebox musical as a relatively recent invention, the result of postmodern game-playing like Moulin Rouge and Broadway cash-ins like Mamma Mia!, but in fact, they've been around for centuries -- in the past, when popular songs were generally renowned for who composed them rather than who wrote them, the jukebox musical was ubiquitous.

There was no better acid test for the notion that jukebox musicals were more likely to meet with success thanks to the audience already being familiar with, and well-disposed to, the songs featured in them than White Christmas. Every song in the movie was by the incredibly successful and well-liked Irving Berlin, and the title track is one of the most popular songs in the history of the English language. (There's an old joke on The Simpsons where Mr. Burns laments that he once lost the chance to buy Picasso's "Guernica" for a song. "Luckily," he says, "that song was 'White Christmas', and by hanging on to it, I made billions.") It had been a massive hit all throughout the Second World War, and White Christmas used it as its can't-miss finale.

Paramount wasn't done stacking the deck, though. Besides hiring Bing Crosby, whose recording of "White Christmas" was the best-selling song of the 1940s (and subsequently became the best-selling single of all time), to play the lead, they crammed the cast with appealing superstars: Danny Kaye plays Crosby's war buddy and singing partner, and the two work with -- and fall for -- a dancing duet played by the gorgeous Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney at the peak of her singing skills. Directing chores were handed to the beloved and prolific Michael Curtiz, the script -- flimsy as it was -- was written by comedic pro Norman Panama, and the filming was done in VistaVision, Paramount's version of CinemaScope, and rich Technicolor that makes it one of the most gorgeous movies of its day. All this scheming paid off in spades, as White Christmas was far and away the top-grossing movie of 1954.

As for the plot...well, don't ask. It's as paltry as the plot of any other musical: Bing and Danny, war buddies under the command of a hideously toupeed Dean Jagger, visit a failing country inn their old CO operates in peacetime. Hoping to help him out, the two decide to put on a show, with the aid of the lovely and talented Mmes. Ellen and Clooney and an all-star assortment of background players, including a scene-stealing Barrie Chase in her first movie role. It's not really any more complicated than that, but with killer songs like "It's Cold Outside", "Heat Wave", "Blue Skies", and the song that its author called "the best song that anybody's ever written", who cares how slender the story is? If you can't be happy with some incredible songs sung by some purely brilliant entertainers, you should watch A Christmas Carol again and figure out which character is you.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A wild ten Lords a-leaping, one of which is the indefatigable Danny Kaye, brought in to replace first Fred Astaire and then Donald O'Connor. Rarely has a third choice been so inspired -- and inspiring. This is a great one to watch while you're not really paying attention, like when you're cooking or eating dinner or opening presents: it allows you to ignore the hokey plot and just let the tremendous music wash over you.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Muppet Christmas Carol

Set Your DVR!: October 13 - October 20, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Here’s upcoming Movies of Interest in the next week! I realized that last week’s entry gave all times in Central Time. From here on out, I’ll do the Central/Eastern thing. I will also spill things over to the following Monday, because several great movies show on Sunday night. Finally, let me know in comments if you see something I missed!

Other than that, the rules are the same: I’m trying to avoid recommending obvious movies, but I know you’re a knowledgeable reader, so some of the ones here might seem large and unsubtle to you. But that’s alright. I’m using an in-law test: I’ll stick with movies that my in-laws have most likely never heard of. And no premium channels, because I’m too broke to afford them.

Mon, Oct 13:

10:30/11:30 am: The Circus Queen Murder on TCM. Pre-code murder mystery starring Adolphe Menjou. Not available on DVD.

11:00 am/12:00 pm: George Washington on IFC (repeat at 4:15/5:15 pm and again on 10/14 at 4:30/5:30 am). Slow and thoughtful take on African-American youths in a go-nowhere Southern town directed by the guy who made Pineapple Express. Obvious influences: Terrence Malick and Charles Burnett.

2:00/3:00 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC. The lesser of the two great existential car movies of 1971 (Two-Lane Blacktop is the other). This one’s still a pop culture point-of-reference, especially for Tarantino movies. Definitely worth a viewing.

5:00/6:00 pm: Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. As mentioned last week, this one is a fun and light take on the concert film, directed by Michel Gondry and built around Dave Chappelle’s general awesomeness.

7:00/8:00 pm: My Man Godfrey on TCM. Now that we’re headed into a genuine financial depression, take a moment to consider one of the great films about the repercussions of the Great one.

Tues, Oct 14:

5:15/6:15 pm: Gerry on IFC (repeat at 7:45/8:45 am and 12:45/1:45 pm). I mentioned this one last week, too. And I think it’s on again next week. No matter, though, because it’s just brilliant. Since I mentioned it last, Scott Tobias at the AV Club wrote a great article on it.

Wed, Oct 15:

12:00/1:00 am: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. on TCM. Dr. Seuss’s live-action insanity. Check it out!

5:00/6:00 am: Shall We Dance on TCM. Fred & Ginger. Score by the Gershwins. A dance scene on roller skates.

10:00/11:00 am: The Legend of Drunken Master (aka Drunken Master II) on G4 (repeat 10/16 at 1:00/2:00 am). It seems hard to believe now, but long before teaming up with Chris Tucker, Jackie Chan made movies that were actually funny. I mean, there’s ass-kicking galore, but the gags he stole from Buster Keaton are just delightful.

10:30/11:30 am: Carefree on TCM. More Fred & Ginger. More dancing. More joking around.

12:00/1:00 pm: Room Service on TCM. Not a bad movie for delving a little deeper into the Marx Brothers.

5:00/6:00 pm: Swing Time on TCM. And even more Fred & Ginger!

Th, Oct 16:

Got nothing for today. Go to the park!

Fri, Oct 17:

1:00/2:00 am: Kiss of Death on FMC. Film noir classic with a great turn by Richard Widmark.

Sat, Oct 18:

3:00/4:00 am: Them! on CHILLER. I don’t know what CHILLER is, but apparently it is a channel I have. Them! is a classic monster movie, complete with proto-environmentalist themes, officious foolishness from the authorities, and monsters deserving of a pronoun and an exclamation point and nothing more.

6:30/7:30 am: Gods and Monsters on LOGO (repeat at 1:00/2:00 pm). Lots of biopics want to wallop you over the head with their themes (hey, did you catch that drugs and womanizing might have affected Ray Charles’s life? I wonder if his brother’s death had anything to do with that), but Gods and Monsters, which is about the horror film director James Whale, has a lighter touch.

7:00/8:00 am: Samurai 3 on IFC. The apex of the Samurai trilogy, also known as Duel on Ganryu Island. Toshiro Mifune is in top form, and the climactic battle is the template for Quentin Tarantino’s understanding of Japanese cool.

12:30/1:30 pm: The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC. Y’know, fuck Keanu Reeves. Go to the source.

11:00 pm/12:00 am: Dick on Oxygen. I mentioned last week that this movie is hilarious. It still is.

11:45 pm/12:45 am: Crash on IFC. This isn’t the noxious Oscar-bait Crash, but the deeply perverse Cronenberg movie based on the J.G. Ballard story.

Sun, Oct 19:

11:00 pm/12:00 am: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) on TCM. The silent version starring Lon Chaney. Yes, indeed.

Mon, Oct 20 (the overnight spillover):

1:00/2:00 am: Eyes Without A Face on TCM. Georges Franju’s horror classic that is guaranteed to give you the creeping heebie-jeebies. It's also well-written, well-shot, and well-acted, so what are you waiting for?

5:00/6:00 am: Kongo on TCM. Pre-Hayes Code movie that must be seen to be believed. A celebration of depravity loosely based on Conrad’s The Heart Of Darkness. As envisioned by Michel Houellebecq. There’s no DVD, so watch it while you can.

6:45/7:45 am: Ghost Ship on TCM. A Val Lewton production, this little horror film was on the losing end of a lawsuit that kept it out of the public eye for most of the last century. N.B. This is not the CGI craptacular from a few years back.

8:00/9:00 am: The Seventh Victim on TCM. Another Val Lewton production. I’ve never seen this one, but I know the Lewton name means it’s a moody little no-budget horror film that will stick with you for days.

1:30/2:30 pm: The Haunting on TCM. My good friend David Smay (author of the 33 1/3 book on Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones album, which you should buy and read and, preferably, love [plug!]), notes that when I mentioned this movie last week, I failed to include the following information, all of which increases your need to see it: (a) the coolness of Claire Bloom's sapphic sexy psychic, and (b) that she was lovers with Philip Roth for a long time (and then briefly married him). Also, if you've never seen her in James Joyce's Women then you should, because her performance of Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is AWESOME. Thanks, David! I will!

Set Your DVR!: October 6 - October 12, 2008

Hayden Childs — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Hi, Screengrab readers! For my first post, I thought I’d kick off a series in which I suggest various movies worth recording off of cable TV in the upcoming week. See, I know that since you read the Screengrab, you have a fairly solid grasp on the movies and movie history, but there’s always some that slip through the cracks. The movies I’ll mention here will give you a chance to catch up on those that you might have overlooked. If I miss something, please post it in the comments!

Here’s the skinny: I’m assuming, of course, that you’ve gone to the trouble of getting a DVR (or have a VCR you know how to set, at the very least) to go along with the cable you pay for month after month, but you don’t always keep an eye on upcoming movies. Since you’re reading the Screengrab, I’m not going to recommend movies that everyone recommends, such as Singin’ In The Rain (which, incidentally, I record just about every time it’s on, because I always have time to watch one of the dance numbers). I’m not going to be too esoteric, either. I’ll use an in-law test: I’ll stick with movies that I doubt my mother-in-law has seen, and that way will try to catch some of the great movies that are more likely to slip through the cracks. One more thing: no premium channels, mainly because I can’t afford them.

Mon, Oct. 6:
Nothing here. Good thing, too, since I’m not posting this until Tuesday Morning

Tues, Oct. 7:
9:00 am: Ace In The Hole on TCM. I don’t think this is a very good movie. But plenty of reviewers disagree with me, so I’m going to mention it. Actually, by the time this goes live, it'll probably be too late.

8:00 pm: Don’t Look Back on VH1CL (repeating at 11:30 pm). Maybe you’ve seen this, and maybe not. But it’s one of the great rock documentaries and, if you watch it, you’ll enjoy I’m Not There that much more.

Wed, Oct. 8:
11:45 pm: The Gay Divorcee on TCM. I mentioned I like dancing, right? This is Fred and Ginger at their best.

Th, Oct. 9:
1:45 am: Top Hat on TCM. I take those last comments back. This one is Fred and Ginger at their best.

7:00 pm: Four Jacques Tati films (Jour de Fete, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Play Time) on TCM. Ah, the whimsy! Can you stand it? Honestly, I’ve only seen the last of these, and I wasn’t much taken with it at the time. But attitudes change. I intend to record ‘em all.

Fri, Oct. 10:
12:15 am: Play Time on TCM. Already mentioned this.

2:30 am: The General on TCM. Yeah, yeah, I know. Everyone should have seen this by now. But not everyone has, so I hereby recommend that you record and watch it if you fall into that camp.

3:45 am: The Navigator on TCM. Same deal as above.

5:00 am: Macbeth on TCM. This is Orson Welles’ 1948 version where everyone affects a crappy Scottish accent, even the actual Scots in the film. Welles’ accent in particular is so horrid and depressing that it may cause you to think less of Citizen Kane. However! This is one of those movies that has enough greatness and interest elsewhere - in this case, in the visual language of the film and the minor plot changes - that it’s worth a viewing despite its deficiencies.

7:00 am: Gerry on IFC. I love the hell out of Van Sant’s death trilogy (is that a spoiler? I’m not sure). Some viewers find them long and pointless, but I think all three have a transcendent beauty to them that gives meaning to the pointless death in each and begs the question: what’s the point of anyone’s death? In this one, two guys get lost in the desert. There’s a ten-minute tracking shot near the end where they walk from the dark into the morning sun without changing their positions to each other that I think is one of the prettiest scenes in all cinema. It’s almost Abstract Expressionism. Don’t watch it if you don’t like Rothko, but if you do, snap this one up.

8:00 pm: Dick on Oxygen (again at 10:00 pm). This movie looked stupid and fluffy in the previews, and I didn’t watch it until a friend forced it on me. It’s hilarious. Best as the second half of a double feature with All The President’s Men.

Sat, Oct. 11:
6:30 am: Journey Into Fear on TCM. Entertaining little spy thriller with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.

7:00 am: Samurai 2 on IFC. The second part of the epic trilogy. Even if you haven’t seen the first part, the plot is fairly self-explanatory and thoroughly enjoyable.

10:15 am: Primer on IFC (repeat at 3:00 pm). Smart, smart no-budget sci-fi thriller. I had to watch it a couple of times (and finally consult a website) to untangle the central mystery, but that’s part of the fun.

11:00 am: After The Thin Man on TCM. The second Thin Man movie. That’s all I need to say, right?

3:00 pm: The Haunting on TCM. This is the 1963 Robert Wise movie, not the awful remake. I recommended it to a friend last Halloween, and she told me it was the worst movie she’d ever seen. I think she’s very, very wrong. It still creeps me the hell out.

Sun, Oct. 12:
5:00 am: 24 hours of Paul Newman movies (The Rack, Until They Sail, Torn Curtain, Exodus, Sweet Bird Of Youth, Hud, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Cool Hand Luke, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Rachel, Rachel, and The Outrage) on TCM. Have you seen all of these? I haven’t. Go on, catch up on the guy’s work.

7:00 am: Cleo From 5 to 7 on IFC. Many classics of the French New Wave spend so much time and effort trying to unlock the mysterious, riddle-like conundrum of the enigmatic, baffling desires of oh-so-fickle womanhood that no one will forget they were made by men. This one was actually made by a women, and you can tell.

6:45 pm: Last Days on IFC (showing again Monday at 3:35 am). The third in Van Sant’s death trilogy. I suspect it plays much better if you don’t really care about Kurt Cobain. I don’t, and I loved it.

7:00 pm: Dave Chappelle’s Block Party on MTV2 (repeat on Monday at 5:00 pm). Aw yeah! Somehow Michel Gondry and Dave Chappelle combined forces to make a concert film that is good-natured, loose-limbed, and funny in ways that most concert films could not even conceive.

Mon, Oct. 13:
In case I’m late getting the next installment up on Monday, I just want to mention the following:

11:00 am: George Washington on IFC (repeat at 4:15 pm). Slow and thoughtful take on African-American youths in a go-nowhere Southern town directed by the guy who made Pineapple Express. Obvious influences: Terrence Malick and Charles Burnett.

2:00 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC. The lesser of the two great existential car movies of 1971 (Two-Lane Blacktop is the other). This one’s still a pop culture point-of-reference, especially for Tarantino movies. Definitely worth a viewing.

America the Beautiful: 15 Movies That Show What's RIGHT With U.S. (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It’s easy to criticize America (and, in fact, we did...just last week, with our list of movies showing what’s wrong with the U.S.). Yet, as we fire up the grills and sparklers for the long Independence Day weekend, it’s worth noting that, for all the flaws of our presidents, our corporations and ourselves, we’ve still managed to accomplish some amazing things: declaring independence, defeating the Nazis, putting a man on the moon, Wall*E, etc.

So, just for a moment, let's all put down those copies of Mother Jones and the Noam Chomsky Reader, switch off Fox News and simply join together in commemorating fifteen films that remind us why the United States is still a nation worth celebrating.

1776 (1972)

Let’s start at the very beginning, shall we? Sure, Stephen Dillane, Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti were good as Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and the eponymous revolutionary in HBO’s recent miniseries, John Adams... but in my book, Ken “The White Shadow” Howard, Howard Da Silva and William “K.I.T.T.” Daniels’ definitive Adams have always been the Founding Fathers to beat. This cinematic adaptation of the Tony-award winning musical by Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone pumps blood (and catchy showtunes!) into the hoary old high school history class tale of the founding of America while actually managing to generate suspense about whether the Declaration of Independence will actually get signed by vividly detailing the players and dueling agendas (North vs. South, entitled conservatives vs. scrappy progressives, same as it ever was) involved in Philadelphia’s pressure cooker Second Continental Congress of 1776. With all the story’s passion and pathos (Adams’ tender affection for his truly better half, Abigail, Jefferson’s overpowering lust for his new bride, Martha, the bloody cost of independence paid by the young soldiers in the fields of Lexington and Concord), the songs (“Yours, Yours, Yours”, “He Plays the Violin,” the heartbreaking “Momma Look Sharp,” etc.) are never intrusive and fit quite nicely into the plot...including “Cool, Considerate Men” (sung by the movie’s conservative characters) which then-President Nixon wanted producer Jack Warner to remove from the movie for its clear-eyed assessment of the once and future G.O.P. and its mysterious appeal to voters whose interests it barely pretends to represent: “...don’t forget that most men without property would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor...and that is why they will follow us to the right, ever to the right, never to the left, forever to the right!” And, while the film clearly sides with the progressives, it’s fairly even-handed in its presentation of the struggle for true independence in America. When Massachusetts homeboy Adams insists on anti-slavery language in the Declaration of Independence, John Cullum’s conservative South Carolina delegate Edward Rutledge slaps back at his smug liberal hypocrisy by pointing out New England’s intimate financial stake in the shipping industry that made the slave trade possible. Ultimately, of course, the warring factions manage to put aside their differences just long enough to form a more perfect union, birthing the nation and establishing a pattern of governance and congressional behavior that continues to this day: deadlock, division, short-sighted compromise and, every now and then, an inspiring historical moment. Happy Birthday, America!

YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942)

Okay, so it's pretty hokey. And yeah, it lacks the subtlety and nuance of many of the other films on this list. And sure, we'll even go as far as to say that Yankee Doodle Dandy – the 1942 biopic of George M. Cohan, starring an irrepressible James Cagney – is a bit jingoistic. But its rambunctious pro-American sentiment, at least, isn't at anyone else's expense: it's the story of a guy who thinks America is just swell, gosh darn it, and he'll be hanged if he isn't gonna let everybody know how swell it is. Indeed, it's even aware of its flag-waving nature, and revels in it: during his own lifetime, after all, Cohan was accused of being overly rah-rah, and responded by writing a serious, issues-driven play – which completely bombed. Audiences didn't want Cohan to be socially relevant. They wanted him to be a singing, dancing dynamo who celebrated the best things about their culture, so that's what he delivered; and Yankee Doodle Dandy does the same. Never a great hoofer (especially in a role originally intended for Fred Astaire) or the world's best singer, Cagney compensates for what he lacks in technical prowess with indefatigable energy, enthusiasm, and charisma. Working with the notoriously strict Casablanca director Michael Curtiz, Cagney managed to add a number of improvised bits that are, today, remembered fondly as some of the movie's best moments. Yankee Doodle Dandy is a big, dumb, fun movie that does nothing but put a gifted performer with a goofy smile in front of our faces to wave the flag for an hour, but sometimes, that's just what you need.

SONGWRITER (1984)

On any worthwhile list of the most beloved living Americans, you'd find Willie Nelson's name somewhere near the top. Beware false prophets claiming to be uniters, not dividers; it was Willie who brought together the hippies, the rednecks, the bikers and the good ol' boys when he moved to Austin in the '70s and helped launch the cosmic cowboy movement. He's the only longhaired stoner your grandmother loves, and the one guy we'd forgive for singing "To All the Girls I've Loved Before" without a second thought. There can be no more quintessentially American story than Willie's, and that makes Songwriter, a freewheeling take on the red-headed stranger's legend penned by Nelson biographer Bud Shrake, a quintessentially American – not to mention criminally under-appreciated – movie. One-time Altman protégé Alan Rudolph actually bests his mentor for once; with all due respect to Nashville, found elsewhere on this list, Songwriter is a warmer, wittier and wiser take on the country music scene and its denizens. Willie plays Doc Jenkins, a country superstar with no financial acumen but a genius for exploiting loopholes (such as playing multiple instruments on a record by a supposed 11-piece supergroup and collecting all the extra paychecks). His nemesis is Rodeo Rocky, a Chicago wiseguy in Nashville drag who has swindled Doc out of his copyrights. A showdown looms, but as Doc's erstwhile partner Blackie Buck (Kris Kristofferson) says, "I'm puttin' my money on a con man gypsy badass true blue legendary bandit hero. And when it's all over they can say he did it for the love, but he was not above the money." Con movies too often become mechanical exercises, but Songwriter is as relaxed and buoyant of spirit as a Willie Nelson concert on the Fourth of July.

THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK (1944)

The late Veronica Geng once wrote of the writer-director Preston Sturges that he "had a supreme gift for making people laugh without representing the world as better or worse than it is." Sturges saw America as a place where politics was crooked and rigged, business was crazy, and the few people who had any brains were liable to misplace them in the throes of passion. Yet his tone towards it all remained affectionate: he was a realist with a romantic streak who appreciated lunacy, corruption and chaos for their entertainment value and could forgive any thug his trespasses if he had a gaudy line of slang and a colorful croak with which to deliver it. (William Demarest never had a better patron.) Sturges knew that the little guy didn't always come out on top in America, but he felt that he should, and he used his movies to set about improving on reality. In this, his slapstick tribute to the virtues of the heartland as he saw them, Betty Hutton is Trudy Kockenlocker, a good small town girl whose response to the nation's call that our brave boys in uniform be shown the affection they deserve before heading overseas leaves her pregnant by some fellow whose face she can't remember, though she thinks his name might have been something like "Private Ratskywatsky." This development brings shame and disgrace on Trudy, her family, and her boyfriend Norval (Eddie Bracken), until Trudy gives birth to sextuplets, a feat that so impresses the newspapers and the clods who read them that she and Norval and proclaimed national heroes. Private Ratskywatsky could not be reached for comment.

WHY WE FIGHT (1942-1945)

Frank Capra, so the story goes, was terrified. The legendary director had seen a screening of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and witnessed the power of cinema to sway the loyalties of an entire nation. Despite the attack on Pearl Harbor, America in the early days of World War II wasn't entirely certain, after the disaster of the First World War, that it wanted to be involved in another European conflict; Capra needed a way to counter the Nazi use of film as a propaganda medium, and convince a largely isolationist nation that this was a war worth fighting. His solution, produced in conjunction with the United States government, was Why We Fight. A series of seven documentaries (most about an hour long and initially targeted at American military men before their runaway popularity demanded they be shown to a receptive civilian audience as well), Why We Fight examined great battles, war crimes, and political differences between the democratic Allies and the fascist Axis. It was composed largely of stock footage, brilliantly edited together by Academy Award winner William Hornbeck, and enhanced by animations provided by Walt Disney Studios. The Why We Fight series is undoubtedly propaganda – it makes no pretense towards fairness or balance, contains more than a few factual distortions, and is meant to stir up the feelings of an entire nation in favor of a devastating war – but it is propaganda of the best kind, which helped the country understand that there were real humanitarian reasons for opposing Germany and Japan. One of the most celebrated works of filmmaking in American history, Why We Fight still has the power to stir the spirit today. Ironically, in a time when America has largely abandoned the moral leadership it carried in the Second World War, the documentary lent its name to another (2005) film which profoundly questioned our militaristic bent, but nothing can distract from the power and purpose of the original, which shows the American fighting spirit at its very best.

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Cyd Charisse, 1922--2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Cyd Charisse, nee' Tula Ellice Finklea, has died at 86. With legs on hinges and a face abd figure that, to steal a line from dance critic Raymond Chandler, were enough to make a bishop kick a rock through a stained glass window, Charisse was one of the most spectacular ornaments of Hollywood movie musicals in the 1940s and 1950s. Not the least of her achievements is that she was the performer who most conspicuously played a big role in the careers of both the twin titans of dancing movie stars, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. As a young dancer, Tula Ellice joined the Ballets Russes when she was a teenager and married her dance instructor, Nico Charisse, in 1939. (The union would last eight years and produce a son, Nicky. Her second marriage, in 1948, to actor-singer Tony Martin, would last until her death, sixty years later.) She made her movie debut in the 1943 Something to Shout About, but the real kick-start to her film career came when she first danced with Astaire, in a sequence shot in 1944 for inclusion two years later in the variety feature Ziegfeld Follies. Almost ten years after their first encounter, she played the female lead in Astaire's great 1953 comeback movie The Band Wagon, where they danced together in two big numbers, "Dancing in the Dark" and the Mickey Spillane parody ballet "Girl Hunt." They would later appear together in the 1957 Silk Stockings. She also danced with Kelly in the big climactic number to Singin' in the Rain (1952), and co-starred with him in Brigadoon (1953), and It's Always Fair Weather.(1955). Of their collaborations, Astaire later wrote that when you danced with Charisse, "you stayed danced with."

Charisse also appeared in such musicals as The Harvey Girls with Judy Garland and The Kissing Bandit with Frank Sinatra, and in the musical biopics Words and Music (with Tom Drake and Mickey Rooney as Rodgers and Hart) and Deep in My Heart (starring Jose Ferrer as Sig Romberg). She also took straight dramatic (i.e., non-dancing roles) in films ranging from Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town to the 1978 Warlords of Atlantis, and after her retirement from movies, she sometimes turned up on such TV shows as Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, and Murder, She Wrote. When she "acted", whether it was in the non-musical scenes of The Band Wagon or her services to Jessica Fletcher, Charisse usually seemed not quite there, distracted, and occasionally out to lunch. But the contrast between her usual lack of presence and the voltage she gave off as soon as she started throwing those legs around just made her seem that much more fascinating, as if she were an ordinary mortal who had the ability, when her body heard the music, of communing with strange gods, from the hips down.

Summerfest '08: "Summer Lovers"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If beers, rock bands and sausages are all allowed to have summerfests, we here at the Screengrab see no reason why movie blogs shouldn't get to share in the fun. Our Summerfest series will take a look, every Wednesday for fifteen weeks from May until September, at movies with the word 'summer' in the title and some connection, however tenuous, to everybody's favorite bikini party season. These movies are by no means essential; most of them aren't even any good. But they will help you kill a few hours when you're recovering form a margarita hangover. This week, much as we did last week with A Summer Place, we'll be taking a look at a movie that became a huge hit on the strength of a super-cheesy, inescapable theme song and America not wanting to admit it was seeing the movie because it wanted to see sme pretty young things getting it on.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present: 1982's Summer Lovers.

THE ACTION: Peter Gallagher, in the days before he was a leather-skinned, hyper-tanned self-parody, plays a Greco-American schmucko who convinces his hot girlfriend to visit the Greek Isles with him for summer vacation. His girlfriend is played by a pre-crazy, but unfortunately not pre-bad-actress, Daryl Hannah, who nails the part of the role where she is required to look hot, but not the part of the role where she is required to play an artsy intellectual photographer. Eventually she gets on Gallagher's nerves, and he starts carrying on with a juicy little archaeologist, played with world-class ennui by the doomed Valerie Quennessen, who you may remember from...well, nothing else ever, really. Daryl stomps off to confront this French tart, and guess what happens? No, really, guess. The answer will shock and amaze you.

THE PLAYERS: Writer/director Randal Kleiser -- yes, folks, this is another auteur-theory bikini movie -- certainly had a strange career. Coming up from TV with The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, he made a huge splash with his first two major films -- Grease and The Blue Lagoon. Both of them made a kerjillion dollars and seemed to prove that Kleiser could do no wrong, and so he went ahead and made Summer Lovers to establish that he could do very wrong indeed. After that, he fell into directing a bunch of kid-flicks, and then apparently met his match in being asked to make a movie that starred both Amanda Bynes and Jamie-Lynn Sigler, after which he fell off the face of the Earth. Gallagher and Hannah both went on to have extremely successful careers, but Valerie Quennessen, who is so admirably naked through most of this movie, became co-founder of the 1980s Obscurity Club with Klinton Spilsbury.

SUMMER FUN: The ubiquity of "Hard To Say I'm Sorry (Get Away)" by Chicago, among a bunch of other hits by the Pointer Sisters, Prince, and Michael Sembello, mde this the inescapable soundtrack of 1982, but as someone who lived through it the first time, I'd call listening to that song less "summer fun" than "summer torture that the authors of the Geneva Conventions were too short-sighted to anticipate". Even worse, while the three main characters develop a menage a trois with one another, at no point in the movie are we treated to a scene of Daryl Hannah and Valerie Quennessen making out! This is as unconscionable as making a movie with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly and not letting either of them dance. Also, there is way too little lounging around the beach naked, and way too much sitting around talking about people's feelings. The proper ratio of these activities in a movie like this is 100:0.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Unfortunately, Peter Gallagher is meant to be portraying a sensitive intellectual and modern male, so there is little room in his weltanschaung for the universal signifier of the big fat party animal. He does spend a lot of time shirtless, which is meant to be a sop to the ladies in hopes that they don't notice what an unbelievably sexist movie this is, what with the two girls servicing his needs all the time and whenever one of them feels a little taken advantage of she gets a lecture on how to not, like, get hung up on the jealousy thing, babe. He also charms Valerie Quennessen by comparing her lovemaking technique to that of a horse.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: If nothing else, Summer Lovers rates very, very high on the Bikini Party Time scale. Shedding all the inhibitions he was forced to observe due to The Blue Lagoon' s underage stars, Kleiser pulls out all the stops here, cramming the movie with as much bikini action as he can possibly conjure up. Even the plot rolls into action with the common observation of tourists who have never actually been to Europe before: look at how uninhibited they all are! They're not, like, all hung up on sex! Therefore, let's screw around as much as is humanly possible. It's pretty stupid, but as '80s softcore goes, you could do a lot worse. Young people would be well advised to watch this movie and realize how desperately bad things were for the rest of us in the 1980s and contemplate how truly far we've come. Everybody needs a little time away...

Yesterday's Hits: The Towering Inferno (1974, John Guillermin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

For most movie lovers today, the idea of 1970s Hollywood conjures up an image of maverick filmmakers being given the keys to the castle. It was the era memorialized in histories like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, when young turks like Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg did some of their greatest and most famous work. But the truth was more complicated than that. Certainly, movies like The Godfather and Jaws were huge hits, but films of that caliber striking gold at the box office were the exception rather than the rule. Then as now, Hollywood has always been first and foremost in the business of churning out big, mindless spectacles, and the blockbuster of choice for many studios in the early 1970s was the disaster film. The biggest of them all was the highest-grossing film of 1974, The Towering Inferno.

What made The Towering Inferno a hit?: In the 1950s, a journalist named Irwin Allen decided to turn his lifelong love for movies into a career. After producing several documentaries and modest features, he turned his attentions to television throughout most of the 1960s, producing hit series like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Following the success of 1970’s Airport, Allen jumped on the disaster movie bandwagon by making the 1972 smash The Poseidon Adventure. Poseidon Adventure didn’t invent its genre, but it stood in contrast to other films of its kind by moving its central disaster closer to the beginning of the story and focusing instead on how its characters reacted to the disaster.

Allen rarely directed movies himself- The Towering Inferno was credited to John Guillermin, with Allen credited as the director of action sequences- but there was little doubt who was running the show. With The Towering Inferno, Allen more or less perfected the disaster movie formula- impressive effects, gigantic sets, and a sappy romantic ballad often performed by cheeseball chanteuse Maureen McGovern. Likewise, as with all of the most successful disaster movies, Allen gave The Towering Inferno the most stellar cast he could manage, top-lined by three of the era’s biggest stars: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Faye Dunaway. In addition, he cast the key older characters in the film with old-guard Hollywood stars like William Holden, Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones. And what would a big-budget film of the period without such quintessentially seventies names as Richard Chamberlain, Robert Wagner, Susan Blakely, and Robert Vaughn? The formula worked- The Towering Inferno was produced for a then-outrageous sum of $14 million dollars, but it ended up grossing more than eight times that amount in America alone, and much more than that overseas.

What happened?: If history teaches us anything about genre moviemaking, it’s that moviegoers are a fickle bunch. The disaster movie was at its peak at the time of The Towering Inferno’s release, but that was about to change. Within the next few years, movies like Jaws and Star Wars gave audiences a new kind of thrill ride at the movies. In light of the lean, efficient nature of these movies, suddenly old-school disaster movies were a thing of the past, and The Towering Inferno, with its galaxy of stars and nearly three-hour run time, seemed stately by comparison. Allen himself couldn’t even resurrect the genre, closing out the decade with three consecutive flops (The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and When Time Ran Out) that pretty much closed the book on disaster movies for years.

Does The Towering Inferno still work?: Not really. If the movie was quaint in comparison to blockbusters made only a few years later, it’s practically a fossil by today’s standards. One of the most distracting elements of the movie is Allen’s tendency to focus on small and fairly cliché bits of character business. At the time, the sight of one or two big-name stars dying onscreen was something of a shock, but from the beginning it’s pretty clear which ones are destined not to survive until the end. Allen pretty clearly divides his principal cast into three groups- the good, the bad, and the doomed. While some people are resourceful enough to survive the tragedy, others clearly exist to be victims or to get their comeuppance in the end. So not only does the story feel safe and comfortable, but it also takes on an element of kitsch as we wait to see how certain characters will meet their ends.

Another problem with the film was its bloated 165-minute running time. You’d think that a movie about people escaping from a fire would be fairly simple narratively-speaking, but there’s so much incident in The Towering Inferno that it overwhelms everything else. The film had its origins in two similar skyscraper-on-fire novels, The Tower and The Glass Inferno, and rather than judiciously cherry-picking elements from both books, Allen had Sterling Silliphant combine the stories of the two books and take the seven principal characters from each. As a result, the movie feels needlessly busy, forever cross-cutting between groups of characters as they attempt to escape the blaze. Some of the actors make an impression- Newman has an effortless authority in his scenes, and Fred Astaire gets a few nice moments- but most of them are lost in the shuffle.

And then there’s Steve McQueen. Arguably the biggest action star of the day, McQueen was cast early in the production and then proceeded to throw his weight around. After being cast as the heroic architect Doug, he decided that he preferred to play fire chief O’Hallorhan. Then, after Newman was cast as Doug, McQueen insisted his role be given equal weight as Newman’s. McQueen was to have exactly the same number of lines as Newman, and their roughly equal star stature necessitated the pioneering use of what was called “diagonal billing.” All of these headaches might have been worth it if McQueen was on top of his game, but he’s mostly on autopilot throughout the film, giving one of his laziest performances. The point of casting a star of McQueen’s caliber is for the audience to care about his character, but whenever he’s onscreen, I was mostly just anxious for Newman and Dunaway (then at the peak of her gorgeousness) to show up again.

Ever since Allen’s reign as the “Master of Disaster”, Hollywood has made several attempts to resurrect the disaster genre. But despite the best efforts of filmmakers like Roland Emmerich, the genre hasn’t caught on. CGI has made effects cheaper and easier to create than ever before, but just as key to The Towering Inferno’s popularity was its all-star cast, and the cost of such a cast today would be astronomical, and a huge gamble at a time when the importance of movie stars seems particularly questionable. The heyday for movies like The Towering Inferno has long since passed, and it looks like audiences will never love a movie like this again.

St. Patrick's Day Video Special: Singing Irishmen

Paul Clark — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hollywood's treatment with the Irish hasn't always been especially positive. The shelves of your local blockbuster are filled with drunken, racist, head-busting Irish cops and psychopathic IRA operatives, to say nothing of the proliferation of Leprechaun movies, both in and out of the 'Hood. The flip side to these stereotypes is the comparatively benign singing Irishman, a whimsical soul with a song in his heart even when it isn't on his lips. In honor of St. Patrick's Day, here's a short history of the Irish on screen in musical form- green beer optional.

First up is Darby O'Gill and the Little People, Disney's 1959 Ireland-set family adventure. Nearly half a century on, the film is an innocuous charmer, but the most thought-provoking thing about it is the casting of a young Sean "Scotland Forever" Connery as the Irish romantic lead. If you ever wanted to hear Connery sing, here's your chance, as he regales us with "Pretty Irish Girl."

Next up is the trailer for Finian's Rainbow, a movie that's notable both as a late-period Fred Astaire vehicle and an early film from Francis Ford Coppola. Rainbow was Astaire's last big-screen musical, and he's a lot of fun in the title role opposite a pair of very sixties costars, Petula Clark and Tommy Steele. The movie itself suffers from some of the bloat common to roadshow musicals of the day, but it's still solid entertainment.

Skipping ahead a few decades, here's a performance of that classic Irish folk song "Mustang Sally" as performed by The Commitments, taken from the Alan Parker film of the same name. Naturally, this is a far cry from the singing leprechauns and folksy charm of the previous videos, but it's entertaining in its own right. Whatever happened to lead singer Andrew Strong? Judging by his performance in the film, the guy's got some seriously shiny pipes. Also, see if you can spot future Once star Glen Hansard.

Finally, no St. Paddy's day would be complete without this rendition of "Danny Boy" performed by a trio that requires no introduction. Enjoy!