The Screengrab : preston sturges

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever!

7. THE LADY EVE (1941)

Veronica Geng: "The American filmmaker Preston Sturges had a supreme gift for making people laugh without representing the world as better or worse than it is... In [his films], politics is rigged, poverty is immune to charity, bosses are petty dictators and workers live on dreams of jackpots, romantic love is either a luxury of the rich or a fabrication of the con artist, and small-town America's morality is the kind that ostracizes an unwed pregnant girl while embracing a bogus war hero. Yet these movies sent waves of euphoria rolling through the audience." That's one way of putting it. Here's another: Once upon a time, in a place called Hollywood, there lived a great man who one day decided that, if he had anything to say about it, the world would never forget William Demarest.

8. Double feature: JULES AND JIM (1962) & BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)

The intellectual wild men of the French New Wave, in revolt against their country's "tradition of quality" and taking sustenance from the grungier products of the Hollywood dream factory, took their cameras to the streets and proved that, so long as they were left alone to get their movies made as best they could, the improvisational high spirits and smarts and humor and excitement and heady romance of their finest work would remain ever fresh. Then, after a few masterpieces, one of these directors settled down and practically turned into a one-man Tradition of Quality, while the other dependably went him own way, albeit with a destination pass that was frequently stamped "CRAZYTOWN." The fact that it all somehow resulted in an American movie culture where a movie starring John Travolta and Bruce Willis made for eight and a half million dollars could count as a triumph for independent filmmaking is actually one of pop culture history's better jokes.

9. FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)

Apocalypse now, and then some.

10. STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928)

By the time Buster Keaton hit Hollywood, he had been performing in vaudeville since he was three, the son of comics who incorporated him into their act. No man has, by his very example, provided a more stirring argument against the child labor laws. Keaton was a simple sort of man for a great artist: he just happened to be someone who, by the time he grew to adulthood, had mastered every skill that might be helpful to the creation of physical comedy and then, having taught himself the mechanics of filmmaking, turned out to have as strong an eye as anyone who's ever lived at staging physical comedy for maximum effectiveness on camera. It is dizzying to imagine what he might have achieved--on top of what he did achieve, which make no mistake about it, was a titanic body of work--if there had been no studio to get in his way.

11. Double feature: CITIZEN KANE (1941) & CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1967)

People call Citizen Kane, the debut film that Orson Welles directed when he was 25, a young man's movie, and it is, though in a way that not everybody may fully appreciate. It is an exercise in high-spirited flamboyance, but it is also, crucially, a movie made by a man who doesn't care about burning his bridges behind him, a self-styled "man of the theater" who, as a lark and a fund-raising expedition, decided to take a movie studio up on its offer of "creative control" and make one of those talking picture dealies, figuring that the worst that could happen would be that he'd generate a lot of publicity and a wad of cash that he could then plow into the stage career that he did care about. It is a movie made by a man who thought he'd be spending his life and doing his real work elsewhere, and so whose attitude towards the faded press baron whose face he was dunking in mud, and the scaredy-cat old studio heads who so dreaded what the press baron might still be able to do to them that they tried to pool their resources to buy and burn the film, was: Bring it on. Chimes at Midnight, made a little more than 25 years and many, many lifetimes later, is a movie made by a man who, in the course of burning those bridges, fell so completely in love with the medium that he would do anything to make another one, patching a film together with whatever spindly resources he could pull together. Strange as it may be that the cocky young bastard and the inspired old wizard were the same guy, we were lucky to have ever had either one.

12. Double feature: ERASERHEAD (1977) & BLUE VELVET (1986)

David Lynch arrived just as the American moviemaking renaissance of the 1970s was winding down, with a $20,000 movie that he'd been working on, off and on, over the course of some five years and that looked as if he'd been quietly reinventing moviemaking, starting with the period of silent experimental film and moving on from there, in blissful innocence of anything else going on in the world. Almost a decade later, everybody's favorite homegrown Surrealist achieved his apotheosis with a movie that was released at a time when indie filmmakers were asking to be congratulated on keeping things safely small and lo-fi and film geeks were catching up on what had come before through the miracle of VCRs hooked to small screens, and served notice that some dreams demand to be appreciated on the biggest screens available, with Dennis Hopper's heavy breathing tickling your ear in Dolby while the lushest nightmare on record unfolded before your eyes. Nowadays, David checks in from time to time via his website, and has responded to the digital information age with Inland Empire, which loses nothing when viewed as a YouTube video, and in fact practically demands to be seen that way. Time for somebody else to step up.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Phil Nugent

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

LOCK, STOCK & TWO SMOKING BARRELS (1998) & SNATCH (2000)

The Guy Ritchie formula seems deceptively easy: mix several colorfully bemonikered, slang-slinging con men, lowlifes, and petty criminals with a couple of scary sociopaths, a handful of intersecting scams and a hundred thousand bullets and beat to a pulp. And yet, as deeply uneven films like Smoking Aces (and Ritchie’s own Revolver) have demonstrated, good-natured ultra-violence can be just as tricky to pull off as the doomed get-rich-quick schemes favored by the sub-genre’s hapless anti-heroes. First, there needs to be a good Maguffin, like the antique shotguns in Lock, Stock or Snatch’s 86-carat diamond. Next comes a solid rooting interest (like the indispensable Jason Statham) and a credibly scary criminal kingpin like P.H. Moriarty’s murderous pornographer “Hatchet” Harry Lonsdale or Alan Ford’s psychopathic pig enthusiast, Brick Top. From there it’s all about delaying the inevitable showdown with as many undercard bouts as possible between interesting supporting characters like Vinnie Jones’ relatively nice bad men Big Chris and Bullet Tooth Tony and various allies, enemies and enemies-turned-allies (and vice-versa) played by the likes of Goldie, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina and Brad Pitt's memorably mumbling pikey brawler, Mickey O'Neil. The real trick, though, is taking the material just seriously enough to maintain dramatic tension, while never quite taking it seriously enough to require tortured method acting from, say, Jeremy Piven. (AO)

THE STING (1973)

While The Grifters made the life of a con artist look bleak and despairing, as fit the work of a born cynic like Jim Thompson, The Sting – a smash hit when it first appeared in 1973 – made it look like quite a dreamy little profession, all natty outfits and colorful slang and snappy patter with your partner, accompanied by the rollicking ragtime strains of Scott Joplin. Of course, no one ever accused George Roy Hill of going for realism in The Sting; what he was trying to do was recapture the dynamite charisma his leads, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, had shared in their previous outing, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Amazingly, he captured lightning in a bottle twice, and even if audiences had a hard time following the big-payoff swindle that Redford and Newman had planned against the sting’s intended target, Robert Shaw, they didn’t seem to care. It all looked like such a lark, who cared about the details? (LP)

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969)

Explaining his reasons for lighting out from his dishwasher's job in Texas, Joe Buck (Jon Voight) says that there's "a lot of rich women back there beggin' for it -- payin' for it, too. And the men are mostly tooty fruities!" Not long after arriving in the big city, Joe beds Sylvia Miles, which settles any doubts you might have had about how hard he's willing to dedicate himself to his craft. However, he ends up paying her, a sure sign that he may lack the management skills necessary to be successfully self-employed. Luckily, Ratso (Dustin Hoffman), the slimy, crippled greaseball with the tubercular cough takes him into his apartment in a condemned building and offers to pimp him to the best of his abilities. The film doubles as a snapshot of the Times Square New York of the pre-Giuliani cleanup era; anyone who sees it and still professes feelings of nostalgia for the good old days is seriously ill. (PN)

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)

Jean-Pierre Melville was the high priest of French noir, and Bob le Flambeur was one of his crowning achievements, a heist film so expertly orchestrated that, along with the preceding The Asphalt Jungle, it helped set a template still employed half a century later. The set-up involves aging, dapper gambler and thief Bob (Roger Deuchesne), who’s so well-liked that he’s friends with the chief of police, and who – after finding himself down on his luck – endeavors to change his fortunes by recruiting a crew for a lucrative casino score. Bob’s day-to-day existence revolves around taking chances, meaning that his eventual decision to pull off one last robbery is simply an example of a man recognizing his inherent nature. If Bob remains true to himself until the end, so too does Melville, whose expressionistic direction magnificently set the stage for the forthcoming French New Wave. Dark, sumptuous shadows, stunning iris shots, and on-location cinematography breathe melancholic life into this portrait of the romantic allure of a big score, and of the inescapable hand of fate. (NS)

CHRISTMAS IN JULY (1940)

By the standards of Preston Sturges's later, wilder films, the dreams on display here are rather modest, but they manage to inspire an impressive amount of damage anyway. Dick Powell, at his most ingratiatingly sappy, is the luckless young striver who wants to secure a solid enough place for himself that he can marry his girl, Ellen Drew. Dick decides that his best chance is to win the $25,000 top prize for the Maxford House Coffee Slogan, a shot in the dark that becomes a major point of his masculine pride when Ellen casts doubt on his submission: "If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk!" (She persists in not liking it even after he's explained it to her, which he does at some length.) In perhaps the most straightforward plotline Sturges ever conceived, pranksters trick Dick into believing that he's won, Dick somehow gets his hands on the money and plays Mr. Big Spender, his boss forces a promotion on him in recognition of his previously unsuspected genius for concocting advertising slogans, the truth is revealed, Dick is chastened, and then of course it turns out that he really did win the contest because nobody sent in anything better. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

PARKER POSEY AS DARLA IN DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

The first time I ever saw Parker Posey on screen, a camera was swooping down on her ‘70s mean girl, Darla, as the dominatrix in bellbottoms screamed, “All right, you little freshman bit-ches!” in the midst of a bizarre Texas hazing ritual in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused...and for me, it was love at first sight, both for the character and the actress portraying her. Darla was the epitome of the smart, formidable high school queen bee nerds like me pretended to hate but secretly wished we were cool (or hot) enough to hang with...the sort of girl that fuels class reunion fantasies of all varieties. And Posey zaps every precious second of the character’s too-brief screen time with megawatt voltage, whether helping Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson keep L-I-V-I-N by grabbing a meaty handful of his aging stoner ass or advising some hapless underclassman to “wipe that face off your head, bitch!” Despite later good roles in the likes of Party Girl, Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming and the Christopher Guest oeuvre, Posey was never quite this incandescent again...not unlike the real-life Darlas of the world, who eventually graduate and somehow never recapture that brilliant spark of absolute adolescent power. (AO)

SEAN PENN AS JEFF SPICOLI IN FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

There have been a lot of stoner comedy routines in movies, but nobody has ever acted being toasted with the Method intensity of Penn as Spicoli, while making it funny. Penn is the kind of actor who aims to convince you he's morphed into whoever he's playing, but as Spicoli, who's "been stoned since the third grade", he doesn't just transform himself physically and spiritually, he declares his emancipation from gravity. Sweetly pledging that all he needs in life are tasty waves and a cool buzz, he blurs the line between being out of it and being in a state of grace. (PN)

WALTER MATTHAU AS COACH BUTTERMAKER IN THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Few things are funnier in the movies (though not real life) than adults being mean to children. And, with the possible exception of Billy Bob Thornton’s bad Santa, no adult character has ever gotten more mileage out of behaving unsuitably around kids than Walter Matthau’s Coach Morris Buttermaker in Michael Ritchie’s The Bad News Bears. An ex-minor league ballplayer who takes a job as the coach of a lousy little league squad, Buttermaker is the exact opposite of a role model, showing up to work hungover, endlessly smoking and drinking beer in front of his young charges, and putting them down with droll callousness. Of course, Buttermaker and the Bears’ story is an ultimately redemptive one, a narrative arc which presumably goes some way toward excusing the coach’s early, improper conduct. But people learning and growing isn’t why Ritchie’s film endures as a comedy classic; the sight of the peerlessly cranky Matthau passed out next to the pitching mound, empty beer cans lying nearby, is. (NS)

REX HARRISON AS SIR ALFRED DE CARTER IN UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948)

Who doesn't love a movie where the fool is the pompous highbrow? As pointed out in the excellent commentary in the attached clip (the only clip of this movie on youtube, sadly), Preston Sturges directs this one fairly close to the heart. Rex Harrison plays Sir Alfred de Carter (the "de" in the middle is an exquisite joke all on its own), a conductor who suspects his younger wife of infidelity. The movie proceeds with a fantastic comic plot: De Carter conducts three orchestral pieces, and in each imagines a different way of murdering his wife. In the final part of the movie, he heads home to put his nefarious plans into action, which is where the movie tips into some first-rate slapstick. That's what you call black comedy! Harrison plays an excellent upper-crust twit, being believably competent in his privileged artistic role but an inept bungler at the fairly simple crime of murder. There's hilariously great screwball dialogue throughout and a kneeslapper of an overwritten slice of purple cheese to cap off the movie. Skip the remake and go straight to the source for the good stuff. (HC)

MICHAEL SIMON AS BOUDU IN BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING (1932)

Boudu is the holiest of holy fools, a vagrant who is unexpectedly drawn into a comfortable middle-class existence where he destroys every social rule he faces. It is a testament to the skill of Michel Simon, who played Boudu, that he remains a comic, and mostly sympathetic, force of nature even as his behavior ranges from merely obnoxious to outright felonious. Jean Renoir was a master of ripping asunder the veil of the French class system with the deftest of touches. Consider the scene above, in which Boudu eats sardines with his bare hands. The French public apparently rioted at this. And at the scene where he wiped shoe polish all over a fine bedroom. But the scene where he seduces/rapes his benefactor's wife? That left them unfazed. The movie ends with Boudu finding a way to yet again subvert his benefactor's attempts to give him the Eliza Doolittle treatment in a way that suggests that he never needed to be saved from drowning in the first place. Don't subject yourself to the awful remake Down And Out In Beverly Hills; stick to the original for the real comic masterpiece. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Howard Zieff, 1927 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

The director Howard Zieff died this past weekend of complications of Parkinson's disease, at the age of 81. Odds are that the name doesn't mean as much to you as it might. Zieff made his best pictures in the 1970s, but his name simply wasn't one of those that people associated with the glories of that movie era. And he had a special problem, so far as his lingering reputation goes, in that his biggest hits tended to be less distinctive than some of his flops, so that to the degree that he had an image as a director, it may have been as something of a hack. But Zieff, like Michael Ritchie (Smile) and the screenwriter W. D. Richter (who wrote Zieff's first movie, the 1973 Slither), other eccentric talents who left their mark on that period without winning much acclaim for it, he was a smart, funny entertainer with his own peculiar comic sense and a feel for everyday American insanity. He first made his presence felt in the culture with his work in advertising, both as a director of TV commercials and his work in print ads. Zieff was one of the first directors to develop a name for himself as a promising talent based on his ad work: in 1967, when he was 40 years old and still half a dozen years away from his first movie job, he was the subject of a profile in Time magazine, which noted that he had made 200 commercials in six years and called him "the leading practitioner of what the trade calls the indirect sell." (Translation: his ads inspired public affection for the products they touted not because they made such a great case for the products themselves but because the ads were so entertaining.) More recently, Zieff's ad photography was the subject of a 2002 show at a West Coast gallery. Talking about his penchant for using faces, some of which were attached to people he'd spotted on the streets of New York, that were different than the usual blond hair/Colegate smile models that dominated advertising in the Mad Men era, Zieff said of his models, "They all had great faces, interesting faces, expressive faces." When he became a movie director, this lust for great faces--faces that could inspire both laughter and warmth--manifested itself as a love for character actors that sometimes gives his best work an almost Preston Sturges quality. He was devoted to the late Richard B. Schull, a character man with a strangled-sounding yet mellow whine of a voice and a friendly, baggy kisser, who helped get Slither off to a sweet start, celebrating his liberation from prison by singing "Happy Days Are Here Again."

Slither--the recent horror comedy of the same title is not a remake--was a very Watergate-year kind of comedy, a paranoid road movie about a paroled robber and former high school football hero (James Caan) who is wandering around the country trying to find some loot that the Schull character has tried to direct him towards. The key the the movie's charm may be that Caan--who came to the picture after playing Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, and who gives the performance of someone who's rather enjoying the novelty of finally getting to play the sanest and least assertive person in a movie--seems to just be along for the ride, carrying out this quest because he has absolutely nothing better to do. The cast also includes Peter Boyle and Louise Lasser, who play a married couple and come across as unexpectedly, almost supernaturally right for each other, and Sally Kellerman as an oddly fetching trigger-happy speed freak. The movie's paranoid vibe is established through such devices as a massive black van--it looks like Darth Vader's weekend getaway vehicle-- that follows the heroes everywhere at the pace of a sinister gold cart, accompanied by its own theme song. Yet it has a genuine grunginess to it, a faint scent of summer days spent in cars and motels in the middle of nowhere. (It's the only movie I've ever seen where a character who is involved in violent chicanery gets stopped by a cop and threatened with a citation for driving while barefoot.) The combination of everyday frustrations and baroque dark fantasy (which, in the end, turns out to have some very ordinary roots) makes Slither a very funny excursion into screwball-surreal Americana.

Zieff's second picture, 1975's Hearts of the West, has a more raggedy script (by Rob Thompson) but a richly felt milieu--it's set in Hollywood in the early 1930s, which looks like a factory set-up on Dress Like a Cowboy Day--and a great deal of charm. It stars Jeff Bridges, all of 25 and as convincingly ingenuous as a freshly hatched chick, as Lewis Tater, who goes West in hopes of becoming a Western dime novelist and gets roped into a job acting in cowboy pictures. Besides Bridges, Hearts features especially fine work by Blythe Danner as a script girl named Trout, Alan Arkin as a touchy director, and Andy Griffith as a veteran cowboy type with a handsome, rugged exterior. (He looks exactly like the guy who Central Casting would have sent to play his part, which in a Zieff project is the surest sign that you shouldn't trust him any farther than you could throw him.) The movie also features a collection of Western stuntmen, played by such modern-cowpoke types as Matt Clark and Burton Gilliam, and when Zieff had an excuse to spend time with actors like these playing characters like these, his work had the happy hum of a man being paid for being totally in his element, as much as Michael Bay on a day when all he has to do is blow something up. Neither of these pictures is currently available on DVD, which is something that I, for one, would really like to hear President Obama address in his speech before Congress tonight.

Zieff finally had a couple of hits: the 1978 House Calls, which starred Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson and which was later made into a TV sitcom even though the movie was sort of one already, and the 1980 Goldie Hawn vehicle Private Benjamin, a film that I like to think he made just because, as an old man, he could picture what a terrific poster it would make: Goldie, in her Gomer Pyle drag, pouting. In 1984 he helmed a remake of Preston Sturges's great Unfaithfully Yours, with Dudley Moore in the role originated by Rex Harrison. I have no evidence to support this theory, but nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that he only agreed to do it after studio goons kidnapped his grandchildren. The movie is bad, but not really that bad considering that the whole idea behind it is blasphemous, and does boast a performance by Albert Brooks that true devotees of comic genius will want to savor with one finger on the fast=forward button. Zieff's last films were the 1991 My Girl and its sequel, the 1994 My Girl 2, after which he was forced to retire in the face of the onset of Parkinson's. My own favorite of his later films is 1989's The Dream Team, which is formulaic but likable, and which reunited the director with Peter Boyle, to great effect: he plays an institutionalized dude who thinks he's Jesus, and he would get no argument from me. The movie also boasts excellent performances by Michael Keaton, Lorraine Bracco, and Christopher Lloyd, and also has a few bits, such as a scene in an army-surplus clothing store run by a hard-to-faze dude played by Jack Duffy, that showed that, when he could fit it in, Zieff's genius for faces was still firing on all cylinders.

Set Your DVR!: February 2 - 9, 2009

Hayden Childs — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

This week has three movies to make your DVR (or, you know, you) happy! First you have a Preston Sturges sex romp straining against the Hays Code. Then a classic sci-fi version of The Tempest with Freudian overtones! And finally, the first third of an iconic samurai trilogy. Enjoy!

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, playing on TCM on Thursday, February 5 at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern. The Hays Code forbade movies in which unmarried people had biblical knowledge of each other, if you know what I mean, and I think you do (hint: I'm not talking about smiting). But Preston Sturges had an idea about a movie in which a small-town lass goes out for a few drinks with some soldiers on their way to WWII and winds up pregnant by one of them. The character is named Trudy Kockenlocker, and if that's not enough for a quick dirty joke, she's played by the hot-to-trot Betty Dutton. To slide under the Hays Code bar, she's had a quickie marriage to the guy. Unfortunately, she can't remember his name. Professional bundle-of-nerves Eddie Bracken stars as her small-town pal stuck in the friend zone, but who wants to be so much more.

Forbidden Planet, playing on TCM on Friday, February 6 at 7 am central/8 am eastern. Many of the sci-fi flicks of this period are about creeping Communism or mindless anti-Communism (as if sacrificing basic civil liberties to fight an idea is anything other than preposterous). In this one, political philosophies are nothing compared to the horrors of the psyche. It's an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, starring Leslie Nielson in a dramatic (non-ironic, I mean) role, and it's a lot of fun.

Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto, playing on IFC on Saturday, February 7 at 7 am central/8 am eastern. This is the first of the Samurai trilogy, starring the always-amazing Toshiro Mifune as Musashi Miyamoto, one of the great swordsmen of Japanese legend. This is cinema at its most epic and iconic. If you watch this, be prepared to check back over the next two Saturdays for the next two parts, because the trilogy really must be seen as a whole.

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

DEAD MAN WALKING (1995)

The funny thing about Dead Man Walking (and, admittedly, “funny” doesn’t come up a lot in discussions of Tim Robbins’ excellent but grim 1995 adaptation of the memoir by Sister Helen Prejean) is the way its tale of a nun (Susan Sarandon) driven to become an activist against capital punishment in the wake of her experiences with death row inmates (embodied by Sean Penn’s fictional composite, Matthew Poncelet) did nothing to change my own views on capital punishment at the time. In the film, Sarandon (as Prejean) is contacted by Poncelet, a convict facing execution who swears he was only an innocent bystander to the crimes he’s been charged with and needs help with his final appeal. Yet for all her Christian charity, it’s hard for Prejean not to see Poncelet for what he truly is: an arrogant, ignorant, self-pitying racist thug...not to mention, as it eventually turns out, a rapist and cold-blooded killer. When his appeal is denied and Poncelet eventually gets lethally injected for his senseless, brutal crimes, I remember my thought at the time was...good. True, with death staring him in the face (and after weeks of selfless work by Sister Prejean), Poncelet finally starts acting like a human being and feels bad for his evil behavior, but...so what? Without the catalyst of his own looming execution, it’s doubtful Poncelet would have shown any remorse at all, and his jailhouse conversion is too little too late: the victims are dead and even a last-minute call from the governor would only upgrade Poncelet’s remaining time on Earth to life in prison (while offering no closure for the victim’s families). Recounting my initial reactions, I realize I’ve mellowed a bit since 1995: given the inequities of the American legal system, I’ve come around to a generally anti-capital punishment perspective (except in extreme cases involving no-doubt-about-it Hall-Of-Fame assholes like Timothy McVeigh and...well, I'll get back to you on Cheney). But it’s a tribute to Sarandon, Penn, Prejean and Robbins (not usually known for his subtlety in political matters) that Dead Man Walking is even-handed enough to credibly illustrate both sides of a difficult issue without preaching exclusively to any particular choir.

BRUTE FORCE (1947)

Most film noir dealt with men doing everything possible to stay out of prison. But master noir director Jules Dassin was never one to do things the easy or predictable way, so he set Brute Force -- one of the most memorable, intense, and violent post-war crime dramas -- inside the walls of the big house. Crammed with character actors who had worked with Dassin in the theater (and who, like him, would soon be victims of the anticommunist blacklist), Brute Force is also noteworthy for making a star out of Burt Lancaster, in only his second film after The Killers. Lancaster plays a nihilistic con who stages a prison riot, putatively to escape, admittedly to get out from under the thumb of a brutal yard boss, but really just to feel alive in a prison that feels to him like a living death. Hume Cronyn, as the prison guard, is likewise locked in a power struggle with a reformist administrator, and the three-way clash sets up a denoument that is as brutal as it is surprisingly human. Unsurprisingly, the director and his actors find a way to cast the whole thing in a political light until its doomed finale. It’s a powerhouse film with gorgeous William Daniels photography that deserves to be counted with Dassin’s best.

SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (1941)

Joel McCrea’s pampered director John L. Sullivan has his heart in the right place. He wants to make an epic about how tough it is for the little guy. He can see it all already. It will be called O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and it will tell the truth in a way that movies so rarely do. His producers, however, would prefer that he make another comedy, because let's face it, those make lots of money for everyone. All Preston Sturges comedies come with a swift punch to the gut, a remedy highly recommended for all moviegoers on occasion. We can be a lazy bunch when we’re not watching out for that fast right. When Sullivan finally gives up on his dream of living like a hobo, the movie spins on a dime and hard times catch up with him faster than he expected. He learns the hard way how tough it is to be the little guy. He winds up with a sentence of six years of hard labor in a Southern prison camp, a brutal and bitter place in which even Cool Hand Luke would work to avoid any failures to communicate with his captors. The scene in the clip above is from that sequence, where Sullivan figures out what charity really is and what people really want from the movies. Fat lot of good it’ll do him, though, unless he figures out how to get sprung from jail. Luckily for him, despite all his boneheaded doofery, Sullivan is a clever guy. At least, he's written by a very clever guy, that Preston Sturges.

THIEVES LIKE US (1974)

Thieves Like Us isn't a prison movie -- it's about criminals trying to stay out of jail -- but it does have one of the all-time great prison escape sequences. With Chicamaw (John Schuck) in the pen once more, it's up to Bowie (Keith Carradine!) to break him out. Bowie drives straight into the prison: it's the South in the 1930s, and with rampant inequality everywhere (Thieves Like Us presses way less heavily on this point than Bonnie And Clyde, which is all to the good), the warden is sitting down mid-day to a sweat-inducing fried chicken feast. The rail-thin Bowie has no trouble outfoxing and tying him up.

ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ (1979)

Don Siegel's second great prison movie owes a lot (maybe too much) to A Man Escaped, but it also owes a lot to Clint Eastwood's fully-developed badass persona. The best parts aren't the methodical depictions of how Eastwood breaks out of the unbreakable, but his laconic assertions of selfhood. If you haven't seen Gran Torino yet (and you should!) and wonder how Clint Eastwood being racist sounds, watch the (possibly NSFW) clip above. What Escape From Alcatraz doesn't do is offer hardly any social context; it's just Clint versus the world, and it happens, almost incidentally, to be set in a jail.

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994)

Depending on when you check the IMDB, The Shawshank Redemption is either the first or second greatest movie of all time as elected by we, the people. (It duels back and forth with The Godfather.) How this came to pass is one of those mysteries that will never be answered. No one really expects IMDB users to be our most reliable cultural curators (see the #5 greatest film of all time: The Dark Knight), but one of those things that drives my cinematic acquaintances nuts is trying to figure out how a movie that performed only moderately on initial release has managed to somehow assume top rank in many people's hearts. The movie's fine -- it's nice and slow, bolstered by patience, a generous dose of well-judged sap and a rare non-smarmy turn from Tim Robbins -- but it cribs egregiously from basically every prison movie ever made without offering a whole lot back. Still, the people have spoken: it's the greatest film of all time, hence easily the greatest prison film of all time. Enjoy yourselves, folks.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov

The Rep Report (December 26-January 4)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: "Essential Sturges" at Film Forum crams a week's worth of the good stuff into what's left of the year, with a day after another of the funniest double bills ever offered to a city full of people in full need of a sanctuary from all the sorry weather. Also booked through January 1, but showing only at early-afternoon matinees: the 1941 Hoppity Goes to Town, the 84-minute animated feature that marked the end of the Fleischer Brothers' challenge to the Disney monopoly. It's an unusual movie that saw the Fleischers toning down the trademark anarchy and injecting more of the Disney cuteness into their mix in what now looks like a desperate attempt to stave off the collapse of their company. The attempt failed: pushed back from its original release date so as to avoid direct competition with Disney's Dumbo, the movie wound up being released two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that did little to whet America's appetite for the tuneful tale of a lovelorn grasshopper's attempts to save his community from human onslaught. The movie's failure led to the end of Fleischer Studios, leaving it behind as a little-seen relic from a remarkable time in the history of American animated films.

From December 26 through the 31st, Film Society of Lincoln Center offers "Scorsese Classics", a full plate of films by the city's favorite son that includes the early Who's That Knocking at My Door?, the breakthrough masterpieces Mean Streets and Taxi Driver and more recent fare such as GoodFellas and Casino and the exhilarating Bob Dylan doc No Direction Home. Of special interest: the double bill of two short documentaries from the mid-70s that remain unavailable on DVD, the Scorsese family portrait Italianamerican and the jaw-dropping biography-by-monologue American Boy, starring Stephen Prince, who sold Travis Bickle his boom stick in Taxi Driver. Then starting on January 1, Lincoln Center passes the baton for "Under the Sign of Fincher", three days of David Fincher movies double billed with movies Fincher has selected as important to his development as a filmmaker, followed, on January 4, by a screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and, for separate admission, a Q & A about its making between the director and critic Kent Jones. If nothing else, this is probably your only chance in this lifetime to see Se7en paired with Mary Poppins.

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

THE GOOD FAIRY (1935)

Ferenc Molnar's prolific output (around 40 plays) was plundered (often in radically altered and/or watered-down form) by everyone: Rogers & Hammerstein got Carousel out of his Liliom, and Billy Wilder's fleetest farce, One, Two, Three updated (apparently unrecognizably) another play. Often forgotten is 1935's The Good Fairy, a triumph of clever dialogue and expert performances over William Wyler's typically ponderous, absurdly slow direction. In keeping with the good "production values" Wyler stolidly brought along for his whole career, things move way too slow. For no good reason, Preston Sturges' adaptation retains cumbersome faux-Hungarian street-name signs, presumably in the name of reminding audiences what cultivated terrain they've stumbled upon whenever an actor gets slowed down by a word. But Sturges keeps throwing away funny lines and faux-ponderous diction in every direction, and the movie's a blast despite all that. "Unhand me, varlet, lest I cleave thee to the brisket!" yells a drunk aristocrat. "I will scale yonder precipice alone!" And he's never heard from again.

HOBSON'S CHOICE (1954)

Harold Brighouse's 1916 comedy was a staple of Northern English comedy, which made everyone nervous when David Lean — "in every fibre a Southerner," notes Kevin Brownlow's biography — took it on. Fortunately, his cast — scenery-chewing Charles Laughton, John Mills (saving his career from impending disaster) and bitchy Brenda de Banzie — carry things nicely. Lean was never much good at comedy, but Hobson's Choice isn't much of a knee-slapper in the first place, so — unlike his awful, rhythmless Blithe Spirit, a mean-spirited, clunky travesty of Noel Coward's play (who responded "You've just fucked up the best thing I ever wrote") — it works. Lean's main contribution comes between dialogue, as in the clip above — continually grounding the mild, leisurely jokes in Manchester's real industrial sprawl. Co-writer Norman Spencer recalls Brighouse never really cared: "He was an old man who was a bit deaf and rather stunned by the whole thing. He said, 'I hope it'll be a nice film,' lost interest and went back up North again."

WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? (1957)

It's nearly impossible to imagine Rock Hunter as a play — Frank Tashlin's movie is so aggressively cinematic, and its satirical points on celebrity's corrosive effects and so on kind of uninteresting. But it pops with Looney Tunes energy, mostly courtesy of Tony Randall: he's occasionally overrun with unexplained evil spirits that take over his body, lower his voice, and make him act as rudely as possible, an effect closer to the cartoons Tashlin started out in than any play. In the clip above (0:53 in), Randall interrupts the movie's action to address the audience directly while the screen loses its Cinemascope boundaries for all manner of TV-simulation; it's the cinematic equivalent of Todd Rundgren's sarcastic diatribe of in-house problems, "Sounds From The Studio," which showcased clipping, weird pitch-shifting and every other '70s analog problem in great detail. Here we get static, snow, and V-hold problems. It's the film's most exhilarating moment, and utterly irrelevant to theater.

THE HOMECOMING (1973)

"Didn't you hear what I said, dad?" sneers Ian Holm in the clip above. Pinter's clipped menace has translated to the screen better and more often than most, but The Homecoming is probably the best attempt to translate a play to screen with as little flash or changing as possible (including, at a mere 111 minutes, an intermission). Aside from one memorable handheld POV shot for the first act's climax — a nervous charge attempted by both character and camera — Peter Hall finds angles that sometimes find visual equivalents for what's being said, but mostly do the one thing that can't be accomplished in theater: have everything happen in a realistically crappy suburban house, without otherwise changing the tempo or performances one bit.

HAMLET ('96 Branagh/'00 Almereyda)

Five years apart, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Almereyda offered near-definitive, completely opposed takes on Hamlet. Branagh has the whole text uncut; to get through everything in a relatively speedy four hours, whole monologues are delivered in breathless rushes. Out of either necessity or bravado (or both), Branagh overplays wildly at times, rendering his every intonation explicitly theatrical; it's a big help for the novice viewer though: arguably the most instantly comprehensible on-screen Hamlet, making everything clear. Updated to the 19th century, it seems, purely to enable lusher visual overkill, Hamlet is both intelligent Shakesperean interpretation and grand Hollywood entertainment. That Branagh stocks all the main parts with theatrically trained actors with basically no marquee value and all the minor parts with way out-of-their-depth Hollywood players (Billy Crystal! Jack Lemmon!) creates an inadvertant but fascinating form of tension and comic relief. Almereyda's version, on the other hand, goes fin de siecle, slashes the text remorselessly and spends a lot of time amusing itself with its updates (the ghost first appears in front of a vending machine on a security camera) and punnish ways to change things by implication without changing the words (Denmark is no longer a country but a corporation avoiding takeover). Within all the jokes, Ethan Hawke's slacker prince is convincingly callow, moody and self-absorbed, but Almereyda knows the text is strong enough to make even this young idiot's plight finally empathetically comprehensible.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

In Other Blogs: Electoral Collage

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

This week’s edition of In Other Blogs is heavily indebted to The Cooler, host of the ongoing Politics & Movies Blog-a-thon (Nov. 4-9), including this tribute to assassination films. “A very obscure gem of an assassination film that I have only seen on television is Nine Hours to Rama with Horst Buchholtz (the seventh gun in The Magnificent Seven) as the leader of the conspiracy to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi. Covering the tight timeframe of the hours just before the killing, this film examines the bitterness and motives that drive the assassin – Naturam Godse. And just like the above two films, things go wrong, as they historically did, as the assassin’s accomplices are picked up by policemen for a silly mistake. And, too, just like in the best assassination films, the assassin works his way through an agitated crowd while policemen make their fruitless last-minute dash to stop the deed from happening.”

Octopus Cinema examines voter fraud by way of Preston Sturges. “The Great McGinty has achieved a type of peculiar transcendence, especially in the current tempestuous political climate. With all the recent talk about vote blocking, mistakenly lost votes and intentionally mistaken tallies, there is a particular relevance in the film's first act in which McGinty earns his keep by voting a total of 37 times. And while his moxie and charisma may now have a bitter-sweet aftertaste thanks to the 2000 and 2004 elections, it's a testament to Sturges' brilliance as a writer and director that we identify with the big lug, even when we know he's fallen from the path. And in that suit, no less.”

Chicago Ex-Patriate finds some inconsistencies in the Cold War politics of Rocky IV. “The training sequences then turn into a sort of political mindfuck. In order to clear his head and focus on the fight, Rocky insists on living and training in the barren countryside with no luxuries, while Drago has the best science and technology as his disposal. In other words, Rocky, the great American hero, becomes a representation of Communism. He's living off the land, training by sawing logs and running in snow. In one sense, he's maintaining his Americanness by rolling up his sleeves and working up a sweat. However, he totally blends in with the peasants who live nearby.”

Roger Ebert weighed in on the election at his eponymous blog. “I stayed up late. As I watched, I remembered. In 1968 I was in the streets as a reporter, when the Battle of Grant Park ended eight years of Democratic presidents and opened an era when the Republicans would control the White House for 28 of the next 40 years. "The whole world is watching!" the demonstrators cried, as the image of Chicago was tarnished around the world. On Tuesday night, the world again had its eyes on Grant Park. I saw tens and tens of thousands of citizens with their hearts full, smiling through their tears. As at all of Obama's rallies, our races stood proudly side by side, as it should be. We are finally, finally, beginning to close that terrible chapter of American history.”

I tried to find an appropriate political list to wrap things up, but honestly, we’ve done them all better here at the Screengrab. So instead, here’s Spoutblog with Jean Claude Van Damme: Five Moments That Are More Fun Than JCVD, including fighting himself in Double Impact. “What’s better than one Van Damme? Two Van Dammes! He plays his own twin brother in this 1991 movie where they’re both out for revenge on the people who killed their parents. Separated after their parents died when they were kids, Chad was given a cushy living while Alex had to turn to petty crime to survive. Strangely, they both end up learning advanced martial arts training.”

Set Your DVR!: November 3 - 10, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Whew! I'm happy that the Halloween season is over! I watched a ton of great movies, but I have horror fatigue. Let's see what the next week has to offer. There's some world-class movies on TV this week!

Mon, Nov 3:

10:30/11:30 am: The Man From Laramie on TCM. Anthony Mann Western with James Stewart. Not the best Mann Western, but it’ll do.

4:15/5:15 pm: I Am David on IFC. Paul “Freaks & Geeks” Feig directs a completely unfunny and somewhat mawkish film about a boy who escapes a Stalinist concentration camp and learns to love. Feig is awesome, but this movie is not. Consider this a warning.

7/8 pm: True Stories on VH1CL. David Byrne’s labor of love, a deliberately quirky look at America from one of its deliberately quirky pop culture figures.

8/9 pm: Me and You and Everyone We Know on IFC (repeat 11/4 at 12/1 am). Miranda July is cute and a little alienating. John Hawkes learned from Deadwood the fine art of saying everything he has to say with his eyebrows. Somehow, despite the nearly lethal levels of kookiness, July has made a movie with an enormous amount of heart.

Tues, Nov 4:

UPDATED!

9:05/10:05 am: The F Word on IFC (repeat at 4:05/5:05 pm). Catch the Screengrab's own Andrew Osborne as the character mysteriously named "Andrew!" Thanks to Scott Von D for the hat tip.

10:30/11:30 am: Grand Theft Parsons on IFC (repeat at 5:30/6:30 pm and on 11/5 at 4:55/5:55 am). Not a great movie, but it's about the untimely demise of Gram Parsons and what happened thereafter.

7/8 pm Decision at Sundown on TCM. Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott in a taut little no-budget Western. Not the best of their collaborations, but it's decent.

Wed, Nov 5:

9/10 am: The Straight Story on FX. David Lynch's G-rated film about an aging man who travels via lawnmower to make amends with his long-estranged brother. It's utterly fantastic.

11:30 am/12:30 pm: Burden of Dream on IFC. Les Blank's documentary about Werner Herzog's maddening attempts to make Fitzcarraldo. This is the rare film where the making-of documentary is better than the fiction. If you haven't seen it, this is essential viewing. You will reach the other side in greater awe of Herzog, nature, Kinski, madness, and the folly of human ambition.

12:30/1:30 pm: The Blue Gardenia on TCM. A scalding film noir by Fritz Lang.

8/9 pm: 24 Hour Party People on IFC (repeat on 11/6 at 12/1 am). Some of the Factory Records bands are stunning, and some (The Happy Mondays in particular) are dull and overrated. But Tony Wilson was mesmerizing, and Michael Winterbottom's postmodern bio makes the case for his greatness.

10/11 pm: The Filth and the Fury on IFC (repeat on 11/6 at 2/3 am). If you're curious about the Sex Pistols, this is the definitive documentary.

Thurs, Nov 6:

1:45/2:45 pm: The Awful Truth on TCM. Pretty much the greatest screwball comedy.

5:05/6:05 pm: Ride with the Devil on IFC (repeat on 11/7 at 4:40/5:40 am). Ang Lee's odd Civil War drama where everybody's on the wrong side of history.

Fri, Nov 7:

8/9 am: Heavenly Creatures on LOGO. Before the Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson directed this movie about the intensity of fantasy in a teenage friendship and the lengths to which two girls actually went (this is based on a true story) to keep themselves together.

Sat, Nov 8:

12:15/1:15 am: La Jetee on TCM. This is the best movie I've recommended yet, and it's only 28 minutes long. I recommend watching it twice in a row, then waiting two weeks and watching it again. See what you remember about it. Watch Vertigo again in the meantime.

1/2 am: The Trip on TCM. This is, like, whoa. And then you'll be all what? And then, man, like, you know, then, you'll get it. And you'll be all really? But you'll know.

7/8 am: Sanshiro Sugata II on IFC. Kurosawa's third film, the sequel to his first. The climactic scene is scarred pretty badly, but Kurosawa's eye is as sharp as ever.

9:30/10:30 am: Picnic at Hanging Rock on IFC (repeat at 4:15/5:15 pm and on 11/9 at 4/5 am). Peter Weir's second feature film, this is an existential horror film. Several girls and a teacher disappear on an outing to Hanging Rock. One girl turns up mysteriously days later. The disparity between the proper Victorian British and the great untamed Australian Outback serves to heighten the oddness of this movie.

Sun, Nov 9:

7/8 am: Amarcord on IFC. The most felliniesque of Fellini films. One of his last major films. I have never thought it was as good as 8 1/2, but it still packs a punch.

9:05/10:05 am: Umberto D on IFC. De Sica's neorealist classic about an old man cast aside by society. Prepare for tears and a greater awareness of the plight of the elderly. You'll never be able to name a dog "Flike."

9:15/10:15 am: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek on TCM. What a conundrum! Umberto D and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek playing at the same time! This is a fantastic, censor-baiting Preston Sturges comedy. Eddie Bracken may not be the greatest male lead ever, but the jokes come hard and fast.

1:15/2:15 pm: The Cars That Ate Paris on IFC. Peter Weir's first feature film. I've never seen it, but it's bound to be interesting.

8/9 pm: Wild at Heart on IFC (repeat on 11/10 at 2/3 am). This may be David Lynch's worst film. Or maybe it's the one with Sting. Hard to say, but there's still something worthwhile in each.

Mon, Nov 10:

8:20/9:20 am: The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years on IFC (repeat at 3/4 pm). Don't let too many years pass without watching Ozzy make breakfast.

2:45/3:45 pm: Becket on TCM. It's Oscar-bait, sure, but not a bad movie.

In Other Blogs: Manny Being Manny

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The film blogosphere paid tribute to Manny Farber this week (Phil Nugent contributed our own obit here) and if that name doesn’t ring a bell, Glenn Kenny has some good advice at Some Came Running. “If you've never read Farber, just stop here and get to it. His collected criticism, in a volume called Negative Space, is one of the touchstone texts of film writing—tough-minded, sharp-eyed, idiosyncratic, often wildly funny, and with a bedrock integrity and aesthetic acuity that even best of contemporary film critics are hard-pressed to approach, let alone match. He is most often cited for coining the phrases ‘termite art’ and ‘white-elephant art,’ two opposed categories. What I found, and find, most valuable in his criticism is his ability to apprehend the entirety of a film—he got it from every angle. He could appreciate a B war picture in the same sense that the guy on the street could, while fully comprehending its value as a work of modern/contemporary art. I'm away from my study, so I can't grab a copy of Space to quote from it willy-nilly. But I can say this: I doubt that Farber was particularly surprised by Godard's Breathless, because his criticism actively anticipated that film.”

David Edelstein has a personal remembrance at The Projectionist. “Manny could seem inscrutable yet was actually hyperprecise, which is why we kept listening, unpacking his phrases, sure that whatever came out, no matter how gnomic, contained multitudes. His writing was compacted, sometimes overly so (he would be the first to tell you that), but the words always quivered with the drive to pin down some aspect of the infinite. Once I made the mistake of saying I thought a film was ‘about’ something. ‘About…’ he said, softly, and glanced at Patricia. ‘How can we say what a film is “about”? There are so many things…’ ”

Jonathan Rosenbaum has an update of a 1993 essay on his eponymous blog. “When we met on campus, Manny—who bore a certain resemblance to Punch in Punch and Judy—hadn’t realized until then that we’d never met before. Back in 1969, when we were both still living in New York, I’d written him asking to reprint two of his articles, on Preston Sturges and Godard, in an anthology I was editing, for $50 each. After receiving no reply I phoned him and got my first taste of his crusty wrath: “Fifty bucks? Do you know how many years Willy Poster and I worked on that Sturges piece?” Weeks later, just before I was due to move to Paris, I wrote him a sincere fan letter saying that I’d just read the Sturges article for the umpteenth time and couldn’t imagine publishing the book without it—that my budget for fees was paltry but I’d double my offer to $100 for the Sturges. A few days later he phoned, quite friendly, accepting the offer.”

A promising new blog called Parallax View weighs in on the new DVD of Orson Welles’ lost film Don Quixote. “From what I know about Welles and the history of the film, Franco’s version is not even an approximation, never mind a reconstruction. There’s no story here, simply a random succession of events and images and a whole lot of narrative detours. But even as a visual record of Welles’ raw footage it’s a travesty. It’s a given that much of the existing rough cut footage is in rough condition, showing the signs of wear and tear from years of tinkering on moviolas and dragging the reels from country to country. But Franco and company have, if anything, compounded the problems with hazy, blurry copies of the master footage and video noise introduced as a result of the project’s most egregious crimes against Welles: the video manipulation of footage to layer images one on another.”

For this week’s List-o-Mania, we turn to Daily Plastic for the Top Ten Loathsome or Laudable Uses of a Zoom Lens. For example, squeezing tears from an emotional interviewee. “And it starts. Her response to the difficult question. The rising action. His heart races. Her chin puckers. His fingers tug the tiny shaft. Her eyes look left and right. She tells her sad story. He moves in closer, close enough to feed upon the tears of wounded subjects. The interviewer tilts her head to the right and nods to keep the subject talking, and then shifts her notepad to the opposite knee so that, when the time comes, she can reach forward and pat the subject's hand, a comforting attagirl for a job well-done. It's a crucial moment. But the squinting man is in charge. His choice to begin zooming now, to draw the viewer into the miserable world of the subject, will govern the edit, will define the scene. When he stops zooming, the scene is over, but not before. It's his shot to get, and his to lose. He stands astride the very earth.”

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

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Remembering Claudette Colbert: "Easy Living" and "Midnight" on DVD

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

There were so many inventive, witty, sparklingly funny romantic comedies produced by Hollywood in the 1930s that the only logical reason that some of them aren't famous classics is that there were already too many famous classics in this genre and the Westerns were getting jealous. as noted already in our regular DVD roundup, today marks the first appearance on shiny steel discs for two winners, Easy Living (1937), which is not to be confused with a 1949 Jacques Tourneur film of the same title starring Victor Mature and Lucille Ball, and Midnight (1939), which is not to be confused with any of the fifty or sixty other movies with that same title, many of which center around a heavyset person who attempts to work out some childhood trauma that had been nagging at him by dismembering a co-ed. If you are unfamiliar with these films and the trend in fast-paced, fast-talking, sexy entertainment from which they arose, you might wonder how they compare with the modern sex comedies you can enjoy in today's theaters. There is no question that, when compared to a movie like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, they are in some ways deficient. For instance, you will search through these DVDs in vain for a single moment in which the penis of the third-string male lead of How I Met Your Mother is comically, and graphically, deployed. You won't be seeing Don Ameche unzip either. But they do have other things going for them.

For one thing, both hit the ground running, almost as if their makers knew that they'd someday be released into a mass-information age where they'd be competing for the attention of people who had a new video game to tackle. In Easy Living, which is set in New York when that was still way cool, Jean Arthur is on her way to work when she's hit by a fur coat that an enraged millionaire (Edward Arnold) has thrown out a window and makes the mistake of wearing it. (She loses her job because everybody thinks that she must be a gold-digging creature of loose morals and winds up without enough pocket change to afford dinner at the automat, which is staffed by the millionaire's son--Ray Milland--who's just stormed out of the mansion determined to make his own way.) In the continental-flavored Midnight, Claudette Colbert gets off a train in Paris in the middle of the night with nothing but the evening dress on her back and sets out to snare a rich husband--like, now, before she starves. (She meets a millionaire--John Barrymore, exultantly pop-eyed--who ropes her into his marriage problems by hiring her to bewitch the gigolo who's got his own wife, played by Mary Astor, fatally distracted.) You might have noticed that, unlike today's comedies, which depend for their plots and much of their humor on the emotional blocks of a bunch of Peter Pans (or "lovable slackers") and the overgrown cheerleaders (who are supposed to be "career women") who are doomed to sort of love them, the thirties films, which were made for audiences for whom the Depression was a still-fresh memory and the Second World War a looming reality, are full of more-or-less grown-ups who see their options being closed off by financial hardship. They have to resort to absurd, madcap strategies and improvisational stabs at reinvention to keep from falling into an economic pit that makes it seem that much more unlikely that they'll find true love at the end; Colbert's character in Midnight is not untypical of screwball romantic heroines in that she sees true love as a threat, a distraction that might wreck her plans by taking her eye off the ball. If I had gotten that job as DVD columnist for The Daily Worker, I could really go to town with this.

Easy Living and Midnight have a couple of big things in common behind the scenes. One is that both were directed by the insufficiently remembered Mitchell Leisen, a former art director who brought a shimmery, Art Deco look to the material that resulted in a near-perfect souffle, airily stylish but with enough earthly gravity to support slapstick pratfalls and such gags as Barrymore indulging in a funny voice when he makes a well-timed prank phone call. Another thing the two films have in common is that both were written by professional wisecrackers--Preston Sturges, who did the original script for Easy Living, and Billy Wilder, who wrote Midnight with his partner Charles Brackett--who hated Mitchell Leisen's guts. The news that Sturges, in particular, was unhappy was with Leisen did with his script for Easy Living (and also with Remember the Night, a cruelly little-known, Christmasey romance that Leisen and Sturges collaborated on the next year) remains puzzling, but maybe something in both Sturges and Wilder was pushing them to be dissatisfied with the director's work because both of them knew it was time to take charge of how their material was filmed; Sturges would move behind the camera in 1940, and Wilder would follow suit in 1942 (with The Major and the Minor, which also comes out on DVD today as part of the same TCM-approved series). So, in an indirect way, Leisen helped to launch a couple of directing careers that would soon eclipse his own. But the man who made Easy Living and Midnight need not be laden down with backhanded compliments. He's got the real thing coming to him.

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.

The Rep Report (March 12-19)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The Museum of Modern Art is honoring the centennial of Rex Harrison. Tall, crisp, and capable of being snide and downright nasty in a way that only enhanced his seductiveness, nobody did sly like sexy Rexy. The programming, which mixes camp giggles such as Cleopatra and King Richard and the Crusaders with prestige bloat-a-thons such as The Agony and the Ecstasy and My Fair Lady, may be too true a picture of how much of this time on movie soundstages was not ideally spent, but the important thing is that it does include his most wonderful film performance in his greatest movie, the beyond-suave superstar conductor whose jealous suspicions towards his young wife (Linda Darnell) turn him into a whirling dervish in Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours.

Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963), the director's heh-heh "commercial" movie, returns to the Film Forum for a two-week run, from March 14-27. Produced by Carlo Ponti and the uncredited Joseph E. Levine, with a cast led by Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance (as an overbearing movie producer), and Fritz Lang as his own bad self, working from the base of a best-selling Alberto Moravia novel and with an actual budget, Godard contrived to turn out one of the strangest and orneriest movies of his not exactly self-effacing career. Long considered a weird misfire, the movie inspired a number of Godard-watchers and other movie lovers to reconsider its qualities after it was revived at the Forum back in 1997; maybe this is going to become some kind of once-a-decade revival rituals. Terrence Rafferty recently used this latest engagement to grapple with the picture in the pages of The New York Times.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Infernal Machines: The Films of Kim Ki-Young" (March 12 – 18) tips its hat to a maverick Korean filmmaker whose work made him a inspiration to many of the newer directors who have been behind the current Korean New Wave. Richard Pena describes him as an "instinctual artist" who "always seems ready to abandon correct or tasteful form for a powerful visual or aural effect. The rawness of the emotions on screen is more than matched by the directness of his cinematic style." Kim's audacity as a filmmaker may have been too much for the Korean film industry, which basically drove him out of the business by the mid-1980s. He was rediscovered and even returned to filmmaking in the mid-1990s but died in 1998.

Romantic Comedies: Where's the Love?

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

A. O. Scott contemplates the decline of the Hollywood romantic comedy and wonders how it is that so rich and noble a genre, a form used by Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch to fully explore the complexities and frustrations of love's pursuit and all its attending derangements, could have degenerated into a way to grind out fodder to fill theaters in the late-winter season and keep Kate Hudson employed. Compared to those earlier great works, "the dry martinis of the past have been sweetened and diluted. We emerge lulled and soothed, but rarely intoxicated." Sure, some of this is the nostalgia talking, but it's not as if the man doesn't have a big ol' point. For some "stars", such as Hudson (and Matthew McConaughey, her co-star in the new Fool's Gold), steady work in such movies as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Alex and Emma, Raising Helen and Failure to Launch — paper-thin flicks just passing through theaters on their way to steady rotation on cable — is the movie equivalent to being a cast regular on one of those TV series, such as Wings or Coach, that seem to stay on the air for fifteen years even though you've never met anyone who watches it. What's depressing is how the ambition seems to have leaked out of the genre, and not just ambitious filmmaking, but any ambitions regarding serious romance.

In the glittering surface of classic screwball comedy, this ambitiousness was most obviously expressed in torrents of language. In Sturges's The Lady Eve Henry Fonda tells Barbara Stanwyck, "Every time I've looked at you here on the boat it wasn't only here I saw you: you seemed to go way back…I know that isn't clear but I saw you here and at the same time further away and then still further away and then very small…like converging perspective lines… no, that isn't it, more like figures following each other in a forest glade. Only way back there you were a little girl in short dresses with your hair falling on your shoulders, in the middle distance your hair is up but you're still gawky like a colt…then when you get nearer you look more like you do now, except not so pretty…but I've only told you half of it, because way back there a little boy is standing with you, holding your hand, and in the middle distance I'm still with you, not holding your hand anymore because it isn't manly, but wanting to. And then still nearer we look terrible: you with your legs like a colt and mine like a calf…what I'm trying to say, only I'm not a poet I'm an ophiologist, is that I've always loved you. I mean I've never loved anyone but you. I suppose that sounds as dull as a drugstore novel, and what I see inside I'll never be able to cast into words…but that's what I mean. I wish we were married and on our honeymoon." And he's supposed to be one of the inarticulate ones! Then there's Unfaithfully Yours, the conductor hero played by Rex Harrison, upon learning that his brother-in-law has hired a private detective to keep an eye on his wife, lashes out: "No man who employs detectives should ever be disappointed. I hope every time you've engaged these vermin you've discovered you had antlers out to here, that you were the laughing stock of the city, and that you came crawling out of the agency your face aflame, your briefcase stuffed with undeniable evidence of your multiple betrayal, dishonor dripping from your ears like garlands of seaweed," and responds to the man's offer to "forgive your insults" by saying, "I forbid you to forgive me anything on any grounds whatsoever and I may still punch you in the nose at any instant! Now go away and never speak to me again unless it is in some public place where your silence might cause comment and embarrassment to our wives." Given special tutoring and help from a CGI effects team, could Matthew McConaughey say all that? Maybe in a month's time, if you let him take a break every three words to fortify himself with bong hits.

Of course, while a glib tongue may be of great use in courting ladies fair [insert joke here], it's not the only thing. Still, it's sobering how little some of the people in these current movies are willing to settle for. In Fool's Gold, McConaughey is good-looking, dim-witted, lucky, and probably a fun guy to have a beer with. Just because these are the qualities Tim Russert looks for in a president, are they really all you could ask for in a fantasy boyfriend? Hudson is actually chastised for expecting or wanting more — though it's not clear that she wouldn't find all that perfectly satisfactory if it just came yoked to a shitload of money. In the great romantic comedies, the hero and heroine test each other, challenge each other, ultimately prove that each is special enough to deserve the other. For filmmakers who prize niceness above everything else, this may smack of bad sexual politics. But even if there's some hostility in the concept of romance as a challenge, seeing the leads prove themselves worth of the challenge made for a payoff that was worth it. In most of what passes for romantic comedy nowadays, the hero and heroine are resigned to ending up together because they're the best-looking people onscreen, and have nothing to do but yell and bicker and engage in wacky shenanigans to postpone the inevitable until the picture has achieved feature length. The really unsettling thing about this is that there may be something more to it than a worry in Hollywood that making a movie about people who really seem special, and not just special-looking, might irritate the lumpen drones in the audience. Scott singles Juno out as an example of a movie that does have some of that old magic, and Ellen Page is definitely worth slaying a dragon over, but for some of us, the weirdest thing about that picture is how abnormally reluctant the heroine is to simply admit that she kinda likes the best friend who got her pregnant, even though, as Michael Cera plays the part, he's openly yearning for her to give him a sign that his feeling for her is reciprocated. The fact is that when a modern romantic comedy like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does tap into something imaginative and deeply felt, it often ends inconclusively, if not in outright despair. It's as if the few filmmakers left who want to bring their A-game to this kind of material are also the ones who are too wised-up to believe in happy endings.

Forgotten Films: "Remember the Night" (1940)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Of all the movies that might have become perennial stocking-stuffers over the years, none has been more undeservedly forgotten than the 1940 Remember the Night. The first few times I came across the title, I thought that I'd seen it already, and that it was about the Titanic. Instead, it's a romance starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, four years before their more acidic teaming in Double Indemnity, and directed by Mitchell Leisen, from an original screenplay by Preston Sturges. Three years earlier, Leisen had directed Easy Living, one of the funniest Sturges scripts from before Sturges started directing them himself. This film, though, is less a screwball farce than a gentle comedy than turns more and more into a swooning love story. Luckily, Stanwyck's just-barely meltable hard edge and Stanwyck's way with a wisecrack keep it just this side of mushiness. (The terrific movie blogger the Self-Styled Siren has observed that it was "written soon after Sturges's marriage (his second of four, but a honeymoon's a honeymoon)."

MacMurray plays a hard-nosed assistant D.A. whose last job before Christmas break is to prosecute Stanwyck, a shoplifter. (Explaining why she couldn't just plead to being a kleptomaniac, she sweetly explains, ""You can't try to sell the stuff afterward, or you lose your amateur status.") Recognizing that he's on the verge of losing the jury, MacMurray gets a continuance, figuring that they'll be in a less forgiving mood after the holidays. Then, nagged at by guilt over the thought of the new glittering babe in his life spending Christmas in jail, he bails her out, just so he won't feel like a grinch, yeah, right. He winds up giving her a lift home to see mom for Christmas, planning to drop her off before continuing on his way to his own family get-together, which is presided over by Beulah Bondi. The all-embracing, loving warmth of the MacMurray homestead sometimes threatens to be a bit much, but it's counterbalanced against the cold-eyed cheerlessness of the frost-covered shack from whence Stanwyck's character sprang; the thought of having grown up there is so godawful that the scenes with Ma Bondi couldn't entirely erase the chill if her house was set in front of a butterscotch waterfall with pet unicorns romping on the lawn. Unavailable on video, Remember the Night made its belated debut on Turner Classic Movies last year, and it doesn't seem to have returned this year. But this fine tribute by the aforementioned Siren does much to convey its sweet, distinctive flavor.

The Movie Moment: The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944, Preston Sturges)

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

For years, Hollywood’s Production Code was the last word in regulating the decency of American movies. If a movie’s subject matter, content, or intent didn’t meet with the approval of the Production Code Administration (PCA), a movie had to be tinkered with until it did. It was a formidable obstacle for filmmakers, and such limits forced them to get creative. This was especially true of Code-era comedies, which often hid dicey material just well enough by playing it for laughs.

For my money, no one did it more successfully than Preston Sturges, who made a string of hilarious, outrageous comedies during the 1940s, at the height of the PCA’s power. Sturges’ best work is full of questionable material that he somehow snuck past the censors- think the Freudian snakes of The Lady Eve, or the husband plotting his wife’s murder in Unfaithfully Yours. Most outlandish of all was his 1944 farce The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, which had so much risqué material that it’s a miracle it was made at all, let alone released.

How risqué, you ask? Look no further than the film’s premise. Betty Hutton plays young Trudy Kockenlocker (Kockenlocker!), who goes out dancing with some soldiers leaving for the war, only to have no recollection of what happened the next morning. She later discovers that not only did she get married, but she can’t even remember the groom’s name, aside from it being “something like… Ratzkywatzky.” Not only that, but she’s pregnant, so she enlists her hapless admirer, Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) to help her out of her predicament. That’s just in the first half-hour or so. After that, it’s off to the races.

If Sturges’ inversion of the Biblical Christmas story seemed objectionable, that’s nothing compared to the film’s portrayal of pregnancy, a taboo subject under the PCA. The word “pregnant” wasn’t even uttered by a Hollywood release until 1953’s The Moon Is Blue. What’s amazing is how well Sturges navigates around his restrictions while getting his points across loud and clear. In the film’s final reel, Trudy is in her final days before giving birth. Unable to show her pregnant belly, Sturges instead films her obliquely, with the camera behind her head while she sits in a chair or outside a car while she sits in the backseat. Rather than denying Trudy’s condition, the camera angles are so contrived and awkward that they become a subversive joke unto themselves.

Yet what comes through most clearly in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is its warmth. A prevailing theme in Sturges’ films is what it means to do good, and Norval is one of his sweetest characters. He loves Trudy so much that he’ll suffer anything for her. But Trudy’s goodness is just as important. She makes some big mistakes, but she learns from them, and along with Norval’s unconditional love they make her a better person. It’s because of this that we care about these two crazy kids through all of the bizarre hairpin turns of the plot, leading up to the final miracle on Christmas Eve, the outcome of which I wouldn’t dream of spoiling for you.

Previous Movie Moment posts can be found here.

When Good Directors Go Bad?: The Hudsucker Proxy

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The setup: After making a name for themselves with a series of unique and relatively small-scale crime stories (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller's Crossing), Joel Coen and his producer-cowriter brother Ethan won the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival with their Hollywood-themed comedy Barton Fink. Their next film saw them collaborating with super-producer Joel Silver and working with a budget of upwards of $25 million back when that still meant something in Hollywood.

What went wrong: The popular rap against the Coens is that their films are stylish but soulless, which is definitely applicable to Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance. Leigh comes off as affected even in realistic roles, and playing girl reporter Amy Archer, she doesn't so much play a role as ape Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. The mannerisms overwhelm the role, which makes sense when she's putting on a tough front for the boys, but once that front begins to fall, the character is meant to be the film's emotional center, and I wasn't feeling it. Compare Cate Blanchett's Hepburn to what Leigh's doing here and you'll see the difference between a fully-realized character and an explosion at the tic factory.

Fortunately, Leigh's misguided performance is hardly fatal, as there's a whole lot of other elements to love about The Hudsucker Proxy. Leigh aside, the performances are spot-on, beginning with Tim Robbins in the title role. As the naïve sap turned into Hudsucker Industries' puppet president, Robbins gives a comic performance that would have fight right into a Preston Sturges film, and his gangly physical presence and good-natured cluelessness recall Sturges' favorite leading man Eddie Bracken. Even Robbins' character name — Norville Barnes — could have been a Bracken character.

As usual in a Coen film, the film's supporting cast is dynamite, especially Paul Newman as the calculating vice president, forever answering questions with a gruff "sure-sure," and Jim True as the chatty, duplicitous elevator operator Buzz. Plus there's the famous stylized Coen dialogue, which might get distracting if it weren't so damned clever.

But the most notable aspect of The Hudsucker Proxy is the world the world the Coens have lovingly created, an Art Deco nightmare version of fifties New York. Norville's experiences in the mailroom wouldn't be out of place in Brazil, while the top-level offices and boardrooms owe a debt to Ayn Rand. Dennis Gassner's visionary production design, coupled with cinematography by the great Roger Deakins and a score by Coen stalwart Carter Burwell that makes liberal use of Aram Khachaturyan's "Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia," make The Hudsucker Proxy the most visually stunning of the Coen brothers' films. It's not perfect, but it's a lot of fun.

The fallout: Clueless how to market the film, Warner Brothers dumped Hudsucker into a handful of theatres to middling reviews, although the film has its share of defenders today. The Coens left Hollywood to make the more modestly-budgeted Fargo, which won back their previous critical supporters and then some. Their latest film, No Country for Old Men, opened earlier this month to ecstatic reviews. — Paul Clark

Stop Smiling: Hollywood Edish

Peter Smith — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Movie lovers will find a lot to enjoy in Stop Smiling 32, the "Hollywood Lost and Found" issue: interviews with Robert Towne and Robert Evans (not in the same room, thank God) and Bruce Dern, Susan Tyrrell, and Harry Dean Stanton (ditto); film scholar and Los Angeles Plays Itself director Thom Anderson and Diane Keaton offer their takes on L.A.; a Jim Hoberman essay on Sam Fuller's The Steel Helmet, illustrated with pages from Fuller's World War II notebooks; tributes to Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Sturges, Fritz Lang, Louise Brooks, Dorothy Malone, Frank Tashlin, and other worthies; and reflections on the movies by poet John Ashberry and underground comics god Kim Deitch. All this plus a photo, from 1985, of cinematographer Caleb Deschanel letting his tiny daughter, Zooey, take a look through the camera lens, that will redefine your previous conception of the term "Awwwwwwww!!" — Phil Nugent