3 Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg (Criterion)

Josef von Sternberg is the great stylist of the thirties, a Hollywood maverick with a taste for visual exoticism and baroque flourishes (which prompted David Thomson to dub him “the first poet of underground cinema”). That’s the cliché, anyway, based largely on his collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, a tremendous body of work that charts the evolution of the director into increasing narrative abstraction and emotional dislocation.

Sternberg Before Sound (and Dietrich)

But step back into his silent work and you’ll find a storyteller of unparalleled talent and one of the great directors of silent cinema. The three films in Criterion’s magnificent box set Three Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg may be all the evidence we have to this era (most of his silent films are lost and his directorial debut, the 1925 The Salvation Hunters, is unavailable on home video, though clips are included in the set supplements) but they are more than enough to show his mastery of the medium and the rapid evolution of his style, both a visual sculptor and as a cinematic storyteller. The “von” of his name (an affectation that didn’t originate with him but one he embraced who-heartedly) suggests an a European émigré and technically that’s accurate—he was born in Vienna and came the United State an early age—but Sternberg is an American, with European tastes perhaps but an American storytelling sensibility.

These films also showcase his often overlooked genius as a director of actors. While Sternberg fills the frame with light and shadow and layers of texture, he strips the performances down to the elemental base, their entire approach to life in their faces, their walk, the way they lean in for a comment or drop their eyes when they catch another’s gaze. In such carefully orchestrated performances, the smallest gestures, a lift of an eyebrow, a shift in body language communicates everything.

Read more »

Here’s another curiosity I came across thanks to an assignment from Turner Classic Movies, all the more fascinating because it’s all true (well, most of it anyway). Music hall actor Meyrick Clifton James really did impersonate General Bernard Montgomery in a British plot to distract Nazi intelligence during the lead-up to D-Day, and he plays himself in the film based on his memoir, which screenwriter Bryan Forbes and director John Guillerman saw fit to enhance with added drama and action that never actually happened. It’s not a great film but it is an interesting historical curiosity and a great gimmick, and perhaps most interesting for the fact that James is rather bland on screen until he inhabits the Monty role, where he suddenly fills out with confidence and authority.

Meyrick Clifton James is General Bernard Montgomery's double

While James is the subject of the film I Was Monty’s Double, John Mills takes the leading role as British Intelligence officer Major Harvey. Mills first made his name as a British everyman in such wartime films as In Which We Serve and solidified his reputation in David Lean’s Great Expectations as one of the class acts of British filmmaking. By 1958 he had aged into tougher, more varied character parts, and he brought confident bravado and a sly sense of humor to Harvey, who enters the film dodging agents and hitting on girls. Charged with hatching a scheme to draw the attention of the German High Command to Africa, he observes James successfully fool a British theater audience (including himself) into thinking he’s the real General Montgomery making a surprise appearance and is struck with an inspiration. With the blessing of his commanding officer (Cecil Parker), Harvey has James transferred, under the guise of working for the army’s film unit, and offers him a part in the biggest show of his career. He studied Montgomery’s speech and mannerisms as a temporary member of his staff, drilled names and events, rehearsed his presentation and was finally sent to Gibraltar and Algiers to play the part for his most demanding audience: Allied officers and soldiers and the network of spies and informants swarming around the bases. With his real identity hidden from all but a few key co-conspirators, James had to keep up the performance at almost all times until the plan was complete, and while the film shows a stalwart James holding up ably under the stress, it was considerably more difficult for the real James.

See the complete feature at TCM here. I Was Monty’s Double (which is not on DVD) plays on Sunday, August 22 as part of a day-long tribute to John Mills.

Thanks to Google and an oddly-timed anniversary remembrance of The Wizard of Oz (August 12 was the 71st anniversary of its theatrical debut, so of course it had to be celebrated on the Google homepage), seanax.com received a record number of visits: over 4,000 hits on August 12, and more than 3,000 of those via Googles searches for “the wizard of oz.” I couldn’t figure it out at first, since very few of them ended up at at my article “Over the Rainbow with The Wizard of Oz,” until I did a little Google searching myself and discovered that the image I used to illustrate article appeared in the top ten results, with a link back to my blog.

So, by popular demand, here it is again.

Following the yellow brick road into movie history

And if like the picture, you’ll love the article!

The essays I write for the Turner Classic Movies website all come to me as assignments. I don’t get to the pick the films, which means I get a variety of titles coming my way, some of which I’ve seen and a few that I haven’t. But there is a real pleasure in revisiting classics that you think you know but haven’t seen in years, perhaps decades. Such is the case with The Wild Bunch (1969), which I last saw on the theatrical re-release of the restored cut. I hadn’t forgotten much in the way of story, but the rhythms and the characters seem fresh, or at least refreshed, seeing it again for this piece. This time through it became clear just how Pike Bishop’s pronouncements of a code were simply empty words that had lost all meaning to him. “This time we do it right” means something after he’s been getting it all wrong all along and trying to fool himself into thinking it wasn’t so. It’s not revenge, it’s atonement, and it feels right for this bunch.

This time they do it right

The film that branded Sam Peckinpah with the nickname “Bloody Sam,” The Wild Bunch (1969) exploded in the era when Bonnie and Clyde (1967) redefined the portrayal of screen violence in a major studio production with glamorous movie stars and brought a more cynical attitude and bloodthirsty spectacle to the landscape of American westerns. In fact the original screenplay by Roy N. Sickner (a stuntman in the westerns) and Walon Green was influenced by the violent Italian genre known as “the spaghetti Western.” In their story, a brutal gang is ambushed during a heist and chased to Mexico by a posse led by a former member of the gang. They agree to steal American rifles from a military transport for a Mexican General but end up facing the General and his entire regiment, fighting to the death in a hopeless attempt to rescue one of their own. The title was borrowed from the name of the gang led by real-life outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but they had nothing on this bunch. The script was short on character and narrative development and big on violent set pieces. Lee Marvin was interested in playing Wild Bunch leader Pike Bishop — he had attached himself to the project even before it was sent to Peckinpah—and the studio saw the film as another macho action picture along the lines of previous Marvin pictures The Professionals (1966) or The Dirty Dozen (1967). Peckinpah saw something more and began rewriting the script, fleshing out the characters, enriching their stories with defining flashbacks and giving a dramatic foundation to the action and the spectacle of violence.

It’s not exactly a romantic portrait of the outlaws of the west — these men are killers and thieves who think nothing of using civilians for hostage or cover – yet Peckinpah favors these men over the ruthless, hypocritical forces of law and order such as the “gutter trash” bounty hunters who see dollar signs rather than people and fire on anyone who wanders into their gun sights: civilians, railroad employees and even American soldiers. His vision never denies the brutal reality of their lives or their actions, but it does recognize their humanity under the gristle, as well their faults. Pike is a man who professes a code — “When you side with a man, you stay with him,” he lectures his gang, “and if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal!”; it’s a code he has failed to live up to with his own actions and by the end of the film, he faces his own hypocrisy and sets out to “get it right,” in his own words.

Read the complete feature on TCM here. It plays on Friday, August 13, as part of a Robert Ryan tribute, and is also available on DVD and Blu-ray.

The Go-Between, the last of three collaborations between director Joseph Losey and screenwriter Harold Pinter, plays on Turner Classic Movies  as part of a festival of Julie Christie features. I wrote an essay for the website to celebrate the screening.

Julie Christie

Based on the acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel by L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1970) is a coming-of-age tale with a devastating lesson. It takes place over a few summer weeks in a grand country manor at the turn of the century and focuses on the experiences of a twelve-year-old boy from a respectable but poor family; he becomes entangled in a secret romance played out under the cover of the mores and manners and hypocrisies of an aristocratic family that reverberates over the course of decades.

Dominic Guard made his feature debut as Leo, a sensitive and sincere boy who is not part of this family’s world, but merely a tourist in a culture where social standing defines every relationship. Leo is tolerated and at times even doted upon, like a favored pet, perhaps, and he’s smitten by Marian, the beautiful older sister who smiles favorably upon him. When he meets Ted Burgess, a nearby tenant farmer, he’s drafted into becoming the secret “postman” between the two. It’s a mere game for the boy, who is thrilled to be part of this grown-up secret, but a dangerous affair for Marian, who is to be engaged to a genuine aristocrat. Leo isn’t judgmental but his innocence and his uncomplicated sense of right and wrong and loyalty tear at his fragile emotional make-up when he becomes aware of what’s really going.

Read the complete feature here. The film, which is not on DVD, plays on TCM on Monday, August 2.

I love the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for a lot of reasons. This is just one of many, but one that defines the spirit of the festival.

Robot and Rotwang

Fernando Martín Peña spent twenty years trying to track down the holy grail that was the complete, long though lost Metropolis. In collaboration with Paula Felix Didier, director of Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires, they found it, confirmed its authenticity and contacted the Murnau Foundation, which had undertaken the task to reconstructing the original version. It was only one of many elements that went into the definitive version now making the rounds in festivals and cinemateques around the world (lost footage was also recently discovered in a New Zealand archive, and better condition than the Argentinean print), but it was the essential missing link that provided not just footage unavailable in any form elsewhere, but an invaluable guide to the artists, historians and technicians doing the physical work of restoring and reconstructing the definitive version.

And yet he had not seen the finished restoration until its screening at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Read more »

Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage is one of the most interesting and underappreciated westerns about the frontier, the settling of the west and the communal spirit embodied in the western genre. It plays on TCM as part of the Cult Movies line-up for July and you’ll why it fits the bill: the tension between personal loyalty and the communal good and the contrast between the peaceful beauty and the savage violence of the wilderness defines the film. I write about it for the Turner Classic Movies website here.

Dana Andrews and Ward Bond: detente is about to end

On its surface, Jacques Tourneur’s first western, Canyon Passage (1946), is a solid but conventional frontier drama of ambitious entrepreneurs, determined settlers, gamblers, gold miners and Indian tribes. But under the familiar trappings of cabin raisings, poker games, saloon brawls and frontier combat is a remarkably dense drama where the tensions between individual enterprise and communal good are often strained and the line between hero and villain is not a matter of black and white, but shades of gray.

…

Canyon Passage isn’t one of those simple little towns laid out on the prairie around a main street with a grid, building out as the town grows, but a rough-hewn collection of businesses and saloons in a community that looks literally hacked out of the wilderness. Surrounded by emerald green forests and dramatic mountains, this is different from the more conventional communities seen in frontier westerns up to now. Jacksonville is a beautiful little town striving for maturity but caught up in the growing pains of free enterprise and new settlements in a place without a marshal or a judge. Roughneck outliers (notably a brutal bully played by Ward Bond), mob justice, and the threat of an Indian uprising are the flip side of the frontier idealism of the new settlers and established families pulling together in the face of adversity.

Read the entire feature here. Plays on Tuesday, July 20 on TCM. Also available on DVD as part of the four-film set Classic Western Round-up Vol. 1 (which also includes The Lawless Breed, The Texas Rangers and Kansas Raiders).

Top Gun may have made Tom Cruise a superstar but Risky Business made him Tom Cruise.  The 1983 film is an artifact of its era as well as a commentary upon it, a sex comedy as social satire that anticipates the culture soon to be defined in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. I write about the film for the Turner Classic Movies website.

He wears his sunglasses at night

The teen sex comedy was dominant when Risky Business opened in 1983 in the wake of Porky’s (1982) and scores of other lowbrow works where boys lost their virginity to hot girls and teen audiences waded through clumsy slapstick gags and mistaken identity plots for titillating displays of young naked bodies. One could argue that Risky Business is an art movie version of the teen sex comedy. It is, after all, about a good looking, wealthy but naïve high school virgin (Tom Cruise) who is ushered into manhood by a seductive young woman (Rebecca De Mornay) while his parents are out of town. Cruise’s Joel is a Chicago rich kid on the lake and De Mornay’s Lana is a tough, gorgeous young prostitute (“what every white boy off the lake wants,” promises another professional) with a dangerous streak and a crazy idea: “If we ever got our friends together, we’d make a fortune.” It’s sexy, smart and funny, but also stylish and filled with social satire and commentary on the culture of money. “This was the Reagan years, it was all about money,” explained writer/director Paul Brickman in an interview years later. Under the sexual fantasies is an anxiety about sex and success (which are hopelessly intertwined in Joel’s dreams) and a satirical portrait of capitalist enterprise that essentially blurs the line between entrepreneurship and prostitution.

Read the complete feature here. It plays on Thursday, July 15 on Turner Classic Movies. Also available on DVD and Blu-ray.

After a career of working his way up through the rungs of the film industry, Joseph H. Lewis’ broke through the B-movie ceiling with My Name is Julia Ross, what you might call a B-plus picture: a little more time, a little more money. But what makes the difference is a lot more care and creative engagement on the part of a director determined to show the studio just what he has  to offer. The film plays as part of a tribute to Lewis on TCM this month and I wrote an essay on it for the website.

Her name is Julia Ross

Lewis’ first film for the studio since 1939, My Name Is Julia Ross was part of the “fewer and better” B-movie initiative, with a bigger budget usually accorded such productions and a 12-day shooting schedule, twice as long as he was given for the westerns he used to crank out for the studio. Lewis made the most of his limited resources, with judicious use of stock footage and back projection to establish the London and Cornwall settings and careful backlot shooting to put the characters on English streets and country roads, or high upon a seaside cliff looking dramatically down at a rocky, lonely beach. He lavished his attention on the mansion sets, giving the interiors a distinctive sense of old-money history and aristocratic elegance; he also photographed many of the scenes framed by foreground objects or through doorways and windows (looking at Julia through the bars of her upstairs window brings the feeling of imprisonment home simply and evocatively). While the characters work to establish a surface of normalcy, Lewis injects a sense of unease into the situation with oblique angles and webs of shadows.

To get greater depth of focus (which would become a hallmark of Lewis’ best work) he had cinematographer Burnett Guffey (then just another cameraman churning out low-budget features but later responsible for shooting In a Lonely Place [1950], From Here to Eternity [1953] and Bonnie and Clyde [1967]) flood the studio with extra lights and then close down the aperture, which darkened the image while still providing a sharp focus. It’s especially effective in night scenes, as Ralph lurks in the shadows and waits for Julia, who wanders the dark halls while keeping an eye out for her captors. Lewis choreographs the scenes smoothly and builds suspense with graceful camerawork, measured editing and dramatic compositions criss-crossed with threatening shadows.

Read the complete feature here. My Name Is Julia Ross, which is not on DVD, plays Wednesday, July 14 on Turner Classic Movies.

Anthony Mann’s Men in War is one of the great war films, and one of the least known. Starring Robert Ryan as a platoon leader dedicated to saving his men, who are trapped behind enemy lines, and Aldo Ray as  a gruff, ferociously competent veteran who only cares about rescuing his shellshocked commanding officer, it’s a stark, intimate film set during the Korean War and stands with Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet as one of the greatest films about the soldier’s experience. I write about the film for the Turner Classic Movies website.

“Tell me the story of the foot soldier and I will tell you the story of all wars.” This quote opens the only war film by Anthony Mann, one of the great American directors of westerns and helmer of the most muscular epics of the 1960s. In contrast to his expansive costume epics, with their lavish historical recreations and grand presentations of armies of men battling on massive battlefields, or the more personal conflicts of the westerns played out against the majestic landscapes of the American West, Men in War (1957) is combat in close-up. While the story of a band of American soldiers trying to survive a mission behind enemy lines belongs to the familiar platoon genre of war movies, it is a maverick film in all other respects. Like Sam Fuller’s equally provocative 1951 Korean War drama The Steel Helmet, it eschews patriotism and sentimentality for a portrait of war from the grunt’s-eye view: the harrowing, grueling experience of survival in the hostile landscape of an enemy battlefield.

Read the complete feature on TCM here. The film plays on TCM on Thursday, June 24 and then again in August.

It’s “Directed by John Huston” day on Turner Classic Movies and my article on his final film, The Dead, is now live on the site.

Anjelica Huston and Donal McCann in "The Dead"

Based on the James Joyce short story that concludes his collection The Dubliners, The Dead (1987) is one of Huston’s most exquisite works, a perfect cinematic short story attuned to the rituals and unspoken bumps in the relationships of family and friends gathering in early twentieth century Dublin to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany. It was also a family affair for Huston, who directed from a script by his son Tony (given sole screen credit despite contributions by John) and cast his accomplished daughter Anjelica (who he had just directed to an Oscar®-winning performance in Prizzi’s Honor, 1985) in the lead. Huston had lived in Ireland for twenty five years and, though he had since sold his estate and moved to Mexico, had retained his Irish citizenship. The film was his tribute to the country he adopted late in life and to the author whose work inspired him as a young man. “Joyce was and remains the most influential writer in my life,” he confessed in an interview during the making of the film.

Anjelica Huston and Donal McCann center the film as Gretta and Gabriel Conroy, a married couple whose cool relationship is unnoticed by the guests who arrive at the home of Gabriel’s spinster Aunts Julia and Kate (Helena Carroll and Cathleen Delany, veterans of Dublin’s famous Abbey Theater) to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany on a snowy January evening in 1904. The film opens as the family members arrive, ushered into the warmth of their home by the doting aunts, who take their position on the second story landing like family royalty but fuss over every guest like mother hens. The arrivals include cousin Freddy (Donal Donnelly), who arrives tipsy and proceeds to drink himself to a slurring effusiveness (much to the consternation of his aged mother), boisterous family friend Mr. Browne (Dan O’Herlihy), who drinks himself into a red-faced belligerence, and a celebrated singer, Bartell D’Arcy (real-life Irish tenor Frank Patterson, making his film debut).

Read the complete article at TCM here. Also available on DVD from Lionsgate (which has corrected the problems with its first faulty release).

The “Native American Images on Film” series on Turner Classic Movies continues with Thunderheart, the Michael Apted-directed 1992 Hollywood thriller inspired by the real-life events at Wounded Knee in the early 1970s, when the collision of members of the American Indian Movement and the FBI agents became a weeks-long siege. I write about it for TCM here.

Val Kilmer and Graham Greene

Val Kilmer puts on the Raybans to play taciturn and loyal FBI agent Ray Levoi, whose Indian ancestry (Levoi’s father was part Sioux) are all the qualifications the feds care about when they send him to investigate a murder on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The young, handsome Kilmer had attained the status of movie star the previous year playing Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991). While make-up adds just a hint of duskiness to his complexion, Kilmer’s own ancestry includes Cherokee blood. Levoi, however, has spent his life denying his Indian blood and the assignment only rouses his resentments (one local dubs him the “Washington redskin”). It, of course, makes him a prime candidate for a spiritual reawakening, guided by dedicated tribal cop Walter Crow Horse (the dryly witty Graham Greene, who was previously an Academy Award® nominee for his supporting role in Dances with Wolves [1990]) and the tribal medicine man Grandpa Sam Reaches (Ted Thin Elk). As Ray digs into the murder case, he discovers the evidence doesn’t support the FBI’s theory, which has blamed the murder on the local leader of the militant Aboriginal Rights Movement, or ARM (a fictionalized version of the real-life American Indian Movement, aka AIM). More telling, Ray’s new boss Frank “Cooch” Coutelle (Sam Shepard) doesn’t even care, which sends Ray digging even deeper into a conspiracy that challenges his allegiance to the FBI (“the Federal Bureau of Intimidation,” as Walter dubs them).

Read the complete feature here. Plays on TCM on Thursday, May 20. Also available on DVD.